I am going to need a book

"God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day." — Genesis 1:31

There was a bird at the feeder this morning that I have never seen.

Not the cardinal, who was there first as always and gave the new one a look. Not the titmice or the chickadees who come in the committee they have been running since July. Not a finch — I know every finch in this county by the time September is through. This was something else. A small brown-and-yellow bird with a stripe over the eye, sitting on the right side of the feeder and turning its head the way birds do, sharp and whole, one direction at a time.

I stood at the garden fence and watched it for about three minutes, which is as long as it stayed. Then it was gone the way they go — as if it had never been, as if the air closed behind it and the feeder had always been empty.

I came inside and could not stop thinking about it.

Earl would have known. Earl knew every bird in this yard the way he knew every tool in the barn — by name, by season, by what they did at six in the morning and what they did at four. I never learned it from him. That is a thing I could have done and did not, and the list of those things is longer than I like to count on a Tuesday morning.

The garden is nearly done. The marigolds are still going but they are the last bright thing out there, and even they look tired. I pulled the last of the spent bean vines yesterday and piled them by the fence for the wheelbarrow, and the beds where the beans were are bare dirt now, and bare dirt in September has a different feeling than bare dirt in April. In April it is waiting. In September it has finished.

But there was a bird I did not know, and I could not name it, and it stayed three minutes and left, and I cannot put it out of my head.

I am going to need a book.

Lord, you made everything and saw that it was good. I saw one of them this morning and I do not even know its name.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.