It was late afternoon when Jamie stood alone beneath the old birch tree in his backyard, fingers curled tightly around the small wooden birds he had spent the last two weeks carving—each one a robin, his mother’s favorite. The sky was beginning to darken, streaked with the gold and gray of an early spring storm. The air was still, except for the trembling in his hands.
He had lined them up on the kitchen table that morning, arranging them just so. Each robin had tiny, delicate wings carved with a pocketknife he’d borrowed from his grandfather. The red chests were painted with his mother’s old watercolors, now almost dry and crumbling at the edges. He had taken care to make each one different—some with heads tilted to the side, some in flight, some resting. They were imperfect, but they were his.
No one had noticed.
His sister had rushed past the table on her way to volleyball practice, brushing her hair into a ponytail with one hand and grabbing a granola bar with the other. “Don’t make a mess, Jamie,” she said absently, not even glancing down.
His father had come in later, distracted as always, and moved two of the birds aside to make space for his briefcase. He didn’t ask what they were, didn’t seem to see them at all.
And his mother… she hadn’t been there. Not for months now. Her hospital room still smelled faintly of lavender, but her hands didn’t smell like anything anymore. They just lay still in her lap now, not reaching out for the little things Jamie brought her. The drawings. The poems. And now, the birds.
He thought maybe if he made enough of them, she’d remember the day they used to watch robins return in the spring, how she’d point and whisper, “That one’s yours, Jamie. He looks like he’s been on an adventure.”
But the room stayed silent. And when he finally left them on the windowsill, lined up like tiny sentinels, the nurse came in behind him and began tidying up, setting them aside like forgotten trinkets.
So now he stood under the birch tree with the few that hadn’t made it to the hospital. His eyes stung, but he didn’t wipe them. The birds were all he had to hold.
He pressed one of them to his chest and whispered, “I made them for you, Mom. I really tried.”
The wind came softly then, brushing the hair from his eyes, rustling the leaves above. A robin, real and sudden, flitted to the branch just overhead. Jamie looked up, startled.
The bird tilted its head at him, exactly the way one of his carvings did.
And then it flew away.
