The Dove Egg

I have seen her picking twigs off the ground then flying toward my front porch. It has a small, white plastic table and chair, metal can to hold paint, my shoes, and in the corner on bricks, two angles where a garden rake hangs. Twice before, Laughing Doves, with pinkish-brown upper breasts have birthed eggs that a cat from elsewhere in the field has instinctively known to find during the night.

Now intending to look for the beginnings of a nest, reaching my hand above my head I swipe away the few twigs on the rake end, tossing them outside.

The next day, my arrival surprises the male, perched on the iron grill, and the female, on the thinnest layer rebuilt on the top of an aluminum ladder under now empty angles. Both stare at me, and I stare back. He flies off. She stays, and I enter my kitchen.

My dilemma begins. Do I remove the twigs knowing I’ll eventually find bloodied feathers from claw-scratched wings and broken shells, or do I let nature go on without human interference? I am reading Cameron Langford’s The Winter of the Fisher. In it, an Ojibway Indian, living by a wooded lake, shoots crows that eat other birds’ eggs. I take on his wisdom but cannot kill a cat, if seen.

Going out to again remove the twigs, the dove, still sitting, watches as I approach, until panicked she flies upward in the twenty foot space. I hear her wings bumbling against the bricks. Brushing off the first few twigs I feel an egg and bring it down cradled on my hand. By her cycle, she has had no time to build a thick nest; the egg was ready.

Rapidly I judge myself then rationalize. My worker comes today and has to have that ladder to paint. But my hand with human scent and there being nothing for a nest the dove would return to, her wildly flying out the grill all become conflicting thoughts of remorse and necessity, and I just stand. Time stops. I am without a plan and unable to help her. Woodenly, I walk in my compound, inspecting first the chiku—it has no intersection of branches to place an egg on nor does the neem. I push my head into the thickly clustered trailing jasmine vines desperate for a little nook and find one curved enough to hold the ending of the dove egg.

That night at ten, while standing inside the screen door of the darkened kitchen, enjoying the loud frog chorus briefly alive from recent heavy rain, a cat, following her nature (which I accept but don’t like), delicately steps though the grill door and turns in the direction of the hanging rake, until my raucous voice and clapping that cause her to look over her shoulder send her fleeing.

My realization is, “When we desire to, but cannot help in nature’s process of birth, life, and death, we may find solace for an unavoidable action in witnessing our sorrow and forgiving ourselves without guilt, which produces no change in the outcome but reveals our heart.”