Story Time

Leaving Home

It was a clear, sunny and hot July morning when the parents, two eastern bluebirds, decided that the time was right. What little dew that had fallen during the night had already dried up, and the sun was just topping the tall, arching pecan tree on the north side of the old, white, clapboard house covered in a faded green tin roof in the middle of the small, neat yard surrounded by colorful borders of tall flowers and fragrant herbs. To the south, at the edge of the road, stood an old elm tree showing its age with gray lichen on its bark, and a typically wide canopy of limbs and leaves that sheltered the front porch of the old house from the brightness of the summer sun. Beyond the western border at the edge of the yard curved a wide lane with neatly clipped grass that separated the yard and border from a small, curving field of half-grown purple-hulled peas, and hugged its contours. Across from the pea field was another lane, at the edge of which was an old chicken coop made of unpainted, notched and fitted pine logs, and a rusty tin roof surrounded by a tall welded- wire fence supported by cedar posts. On one of the posts, about six feet high and facing towards the morning sun, sat the home of the bluebirds...