I have a wreath I’ve had for years.  It looks like the one I’ve posted here, because I couldn’t take a picture of it to share with you, for reasons you will know forthwith.  It is, as you see, a twig wreath, with sprigs of Forsythia, and I put it up every Spring, although it’s been getting rather shabby, and each season, I say, will be the last one.

We’ve been getting into feeding the birds in the last few years, and we get quite a variety.  I noticed something different about my wreath recently:  it looked as if a pattern in the twigs had formed, and I realized it was a perfectly round hole, which turned out to be a bird’s nest.  How clever of that Wren, we thought, to build such an attractive home for her babies.  Each time we opened the door, Mama Wren would fly away, presumably to return once we were gone, and each time we came back, it would be the same.

Today, I was sitting on the couch in the living room, and I heard thumping and scrabbling outside.  Turned out our cat, Sita, had managed to leap from the red rocking chair next to the milk can, up to the wreath and pull it down.  The eggs were lying broken on the porch boards, and the mother was gone.  It was quite a leap from the rocking chair to the nest, even with the milk can for a waystop, but she did it, by golly.

As might be imagined, we are struggling with feelings of anger toward the cat, sadness for mother and babies, and the need to anthropomorphize the motives of all involved in this event.  But after all, this is the way life is.  Might makes right.  Cats eat birds, if they get half a chance

This morning, my husband reported, “… Momma Wren was singing myriad calls on the railing across from where the nest had been. Another wren was nearby in a hanging ivy. After a few seconds of song, they both flew away.”

The Creator is hidden in His own Creation.  –Inayat Khan