WHEN THERE WERE BIRDS

Dahlia gazed at the freshly dug hole and its pine box occupant without really seeing it. She pictured instead her grandmother’s warm smile, never wanting to forget it. Even her flowery perfume and warm peach cobbler scent lingered in the air.

She’s gone, Dahlia repeated to herself, pulling out a small black and white photograph her mother had recently given her. Dahlia studied it again, fascinated. Elizabeth, age 19 had been scribbled on the bottom edge in minute cursive. She was the same age in the photograph as Dahlia was now.

“You look so much like her, it’s spooky,” Lily commented, wrapping an arm around her sister’s waist.

“I know, right? It’s so weird,” Dahlia replied. A few years younger, Lily looked more like their mother, except for her hair. She had inherited their grandmother’s strawberry color, while Dahlia’s matched their mother’s dark brown.

“I loved her stories,” Dahlia reminisced.

“Me too.”

“Remember the birds?” she asked, grinning.

Lily’s eyebrows crinkled in confusion. How she could have forgotten, Dahlia didn’t know, for their grandmother always began her stories the same way.

“Oh, yeah!” Lily’s eyes brightened and she grinned. “The birds!”

The girls laughed.

“What are you two giggling about?” Their mother asked nasally, drying her eyes.

Dahlia smiled. “Grandma always started a story with ‘when there were birds’.”

Theresa glanced at her own sisters, who nodded with soft smiles.

“Ah, yes. That’s right.”

Dahlia and Lily stared at their mother, waiting, hoping. But she never liked to talk about her childhood. The oldest of seven, Theresa remembered the birds, but not well as she had been so young. Dahlia’s aunts surreptitiously glanced at her too, as she was the only one left in the family who could remember.

Dahlia had longed to see them in her youth. She had spent hours and hours daydreaming about what it would be like to catch a glimpse of one in the sky, splashing color onto the pale blue canvas, or flying passed in a whirl of color and feathers. She imagined how it would be now, standing amongst the trees as they were, listening to something more than wind bustling the canopies. Had they really made sounds like a song? Or was it more of a whistle? She knew it had to be more than her grandmother’s description of “chirp, chirp, chirp.”

Photographs in books did not do them justice. Dahlia wanted to see them in real life. To hear them. Most of all, to exist in a time alongside them.

But there were many things she had never seen or experienced. That was her life. How could she know any different, or miss what was never there to begin with? At least, that’s what Dahlia told herself when the longing became too much, when she ached for another time. And she understood why it was so difficult for her mother to talk about it. As bad as it was to not experience the things that were, it must have been terrible to have witnessed the loss of them.

Not that she had owned the birds or other things in any way. That, her mother had told her repeatedly, and Dahlia understood now. “We do not own the beauty of this world, Dahlia. And we do not seek to rule over that which once was or may someday be again.”

Curiosity and imagination go hand-in-hand, and that had been Dahlia’s childhood. She devoured every book she could get her grubby little hands on. And yet, there was still so much she didn’t know.

What Dahlia desperately wanted to find was a book that explained everything that had happened, especially about the birds. But no books had been written about it. All they had were stories.

In her own furtive imagination, Dahlia envisioned the time when there were birds and the present separated by a single moment; before and after. “Everything just shut down,” her mother would repeat for the umpteenth time when Dahlia pestered for details. But it wasn’t that simple.

“She did love the birds,” Theresa said softly, gazing at the fresh flowers atop her mother’s heavy coffin. Dahlia, Lily, and their aunties waited with bated breath.

“And gardening. One day, mom was planting lavender when a cardinal fluttered down and landed on her shoulder.” Tears dripped down Theresa’s flushed cheeks. “Of course, that was in the Before Times. When there were birds.”