Hit and Run

Summer grasses grow tall at the edge of our single-lane road. Their faded heads, heavy with seeds, lean gracefully toward the pavement. The path is narrow, and much of it is winding, with sharp curves that demand a slower speed. But, on the straight and open stretches, cars fly.
The homes here are set back from the road.
And what surrounds them has grown wild and free.

I stood nose to nose with a pick-up truck at the stop sign on the corner yesterday. He turned onto our lane and sped off, ahead of me, until I could no longer see him.
I’m sure he didn’t have time to stop, if he saw her at all.
For, I found her fluttering on the pavement just seconds later.
A Brown Thrasher, like one of the pair I’d seen earlier that morning on our lawn, down the road, near the woods’ edge.

I lifted her with cupped hands and folded them around her--quieting her wings, shielding her face from what I knew must be horribly frightening, though I knew it would not help.
Moments later, within the darkness of my hands, she lay still.



She rests, now, with tall grasses around her.
Where the pavement ends and her world begins.

It would seem, a life lived wild and free deserves, at the very least, that.

Moth Mullein against Chicory