The Grey Heron

When wildlife wraps you in its soft fabric

It was a sad, cold, gray day, as we sometimes go through. My car was bobbing along the country roads of my childhood, the trunk loaded with supplies meant to keep me alive and to make me feel good. Living a few miles from where you grew up is like watching a rainbow appear and then fade away. Sometimes joyful memories catch up with us like a child running back to the comforting arms of his mother. And other times we are filled with nostalgia for a bygone era and a vanished life. That day, as I drove towards my lifeless apartment, the past caught up with me again. Lying next to each other on our lawn chairs, just at the end of the driveway lined with our fruit trees, my mother and I were looking up at the clear sky, praying for the shooting stars of the Perseids to caress our faces. I could have gone deeper into the depths of my memory and found my father around the flowering gooseberries, but an elegant grey heron standing in the middle of the field on my right suddenly brought me back into the present. He seemed to be a spectator of my motorized wandering and my eyes had a hard time staying on the road ahead. Without knowing it, he had just offered me a moment of grace, just by his presence in the world. A few hours later, I fell asleep as if wrapped between his gray wings and against his white belly striped black.