Julie Zickefoose: Ruby's Gone

May 23, 2008

The impact shook the floor under my feet. A bird had hit the window of our downstairs bedroom—a big bird, and from the force of the impact I knew it would die. After 15 years in a house with big windows, you learn such things whether you want to or not.

She’d been coming to the back deck railing for three years: Ruby, a red-bellied woodpecker with two scarlet feathers in her gray forecrown. By these two small feathers I knew her, named her, and allowed myself into her world. I knew her mate, the male with wide black bars on his wings, and red feathers pulled down low over his eyes like bangs.

Ruby waited for me every morning in the weeping willow, watching me at my morning routine, waiting for the mixture of peanut butter, cornmeal, oats and lard that I made and put out for her every day. I knew the sound of her voice and she knew mine, flying to the deck railing in expectation when she heard me first thing in the morning. I knew that when she hit the window she was feeding a brood of young in the woods behind the house.

And here she was face down in the painted ferns beneath the window, stretching her wings one last time.

I looked down on myself, doubled over in grief with a dead woodpecker in my cupped hands. Another bird might hit the window; so many have, to be cradled with an abstract and fleeting sadness before I buried them. But I knew this woodpecker. It wasn’t just another bird. This still-warm body in my hands was Ruby.

I listen to reports from China every afternoon. Tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes; the sheer scope of their destruction can numb us, cast us into the realm of the surreal, our ears closed and our minds floating away. In one, I heard a doctor speaking in halting English about the flood of patients he was seeing, most of them living in tents or under tarpaulins, all of them showing the effects of exposure and inestimable loss. He spoke matter-of-factly about his efforts to help as many as possible. At the end of the report, it was revealed that the doctor’s 26-year-old daughter had been lost in the earthquake; that he was working doubled over by his own grief, the greatest a parent can know. I pulled my car over, laid my head on the steering wheel, and wept.

In a classic children’s story, the Velveteen Rabbit becomes real when a boy loves him enough. The toy, tattered from too many hugs, sheds its threadbare skin and leaps and gambols at night with real rabbits in a moonlit meadow. So do stricken people in a far-flung land, and yes, even woodpeckers, become real in our minds and hearts. In the end, I think, it’s better to have listened for their voices, to have allowed ourselves into their world, to sit down sometimes and weep for them.