Bird language…

                                                             It is what it is... Todd Bertuzzi…

In my last two years of teaching, at the school I worked at for thirteen years, I experienced the gift of a group of children who are off the charts…

regular classroom…

suburban school district… 

And after Winter break, in came another student from out of the blue…

Elijah is the oldest of three brothers… all of them incredibly beautiful and sweet…

As soon as I met him I knew he came for a reason..

His mom told me the next year, when I kept him for grade two, that she was really struggling with him at home…

He was asking too many questions…

She said, “You should have been his mother…”

I said, “He chose you to be his mother… he wanted me to be his teacher…”

Elijah loved to work on special projects… he especially loved to draw maps… 

In his year of grade two we had a student teacher working with us…

Any chance he got he would ask her to sit with him while he drew… and the two of them would discuss the world…

He liked me to read with him… he would chose books and as I read he would make lists of questions that came up for us on the white board…

At first it was just him and I while the other students worked together during Quiet Reading,

after every lunch hour…

Eventually our Big Questions group grew to include the whole class…

One boy wondered, “Where do camels go when it is windy on the desert???”

But he already had his own answer up his sleeve…

He said, “I think they go to a temple…”

Another boy asked, “Why do aliens always say… We come in PEACE???”

Elijah also wrote pages and pages of bird language…

I never asked him to translate for me because somehow I understood it too…

without needing words…

There are eagles that nest in my neighbourhood… in the downtown Eastside…

For the last couple of years I haven’t seen them much because they switched things up and moved to another tree at the back of the park by the tennis courts…

Working undercover…

But I’ve recently heard reports that there is new activity… at the old nest…

The male eagle has been spotted dive bombing the cottonwoods… snapping off bare branches with his talons which he brings over to re-build the nest…

No rest for the wicked…

I always wonder about birds that mate for life…

How do they know that this is the one???

Does an eagle ever come home to its mate and say, in bird langauge,

“Sorry but my needs aren’t being met here… I was on auto-pilot when we made that egg you’re sitting on… and I’ve found another bird…”???

Somehow I don’t think so…

From what I can see there is no question about what each one is supposed to do…

It’s clear…

and they get it done properly…

Giving new meaning to the vow… 

Until death do us part…

I will know you by your easy way...