At age 14, in the early evening, I was
sitting in the living room chatting with my mom, and interrupted by a loud
bang against the kitchen window. The window was the largest in the house and overlooked the backyard; I couldn't spot the object which had caused the sound from inside the house. I went out the back
door to the deck and found a small bird on the patio. Not hesitating to
pick the bird up with bare hands, I noticed it was quite warm, had gray feathers with a yellow throat - though I
never identified the bird taxonomically. Minding the
broken neck, I put the sparrow in a shoe-box, we had a plethora of empty boxes,
and took it to the edge of the town’s public beach close to one of the few
lighthouses. I buried it about 30 feet from the water’s edge, and about three
feet under the sand. It was hard work, shoveling out wet sand with nearby dry sticks and fragments. I marked
it with a desiccated piece of driftwood, which, at the time, took much sweat to
drag it 10 feet to its new residence over the bird.
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