In my Kansas backyard, a parable for Texas school shooting  – Kansas Reflector

Kansas Reflector welcomes opinion items from writers who share our purpose of widening the dialog about how public insurance policies have an effect on the day-to-day lives of individuals all through our state. Eric Thomas directs the Kansas Scholastic Press Affiliation and teaches visible journalism and photojournalism on the College of Kansas.

My daughter got here in from our yard to inform me one thing was improper.

Our household canine, she stated, had one thing. A child hen.

That morning, like many different mornings just lately, I struggled to pry myself away from studying information, listening to podcasts and weighing coverage responses to gun violence in America. Most of my time on the subject has been scrolling by social media, studying posts of anguish and frustration responding to the varsity shootings in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 college students and two lecturers.

Opening the again door onto our deck, I walked out into the slanting daylight of a quiet Kansas summer time morning. Within the grass under me, our canine stood over a small tuft of feathers nestled into the grass.

“Come right here, woman,” I requested gently at first. “Depart it.”

She regarded up at me and froze, her entrance ft remained astride the brown child hen. She didn’t transfer. 

“Mae. Come right here!” I ordered. She regarded down on the hen after which again to me, by no means budging. 

As I walked down the staircase to the yard, I remembered. A month earlier than, I had been trimming the bushes only a few yards away from the place my canine now stood. As I clipped stray limbs, I heard loud squawks and tweets immediately above my head. I regarded as much as see a nest, only a foot away.

“Don’t fear,” I informed the unseen birds, as I moved away from the bush after clipping the final department. “We’re not going to harm anyone. The whole lot’s all proper.”

Now, standing subsequent to our canine and its prey, I noticed the cardinal dad and mom watching us. I noticed the daddy first, his vibrant pink coloring perched on a snaking tree trunk on our again fence line. He darted to a fence publish, then again to the tree trunk, after which to a tree department. As he did, he voiced an pressing, staccato name. The mom, along with her muted pink plumage, was flitting between completely different perches and squawking as nicely.

The scene turned greater than merely an on a regular basis anecdote about our canine catching a small animal. This small tragedy of nature in our yard turned a parable: a narrative echoing the grief and powerlessness of fogeys throughout the nation as they arrive at faculties to search out carnage and despair.

The stillness at my ft — my canine and the infant hen — contrasted the frantic motion and voices of the cardinals. 

I assumed the hen was useless. I grasped my canine’s collar, pulling her again into the home. She craned her neck again to the infant hen, drawn to her prey by forces she couldn’t management or perceive. 

Inside, I discovered a plastic bag to take away the hen’s physique. My children, bereft on the prospect of loss of life in our yard, regarded by the slats within the blinds. 

Outdoors once more, I bent down over the lifeless child hen, the mom and father nonetheless circling the scene. I regarded towards them after which glanced again towards the bush with the nest. I imagined the scene that had occurred there this morning. The child hen possible had stepped to the sting of the nest for one among its first makes an attempt at flight.

I imagined the dad and mom watching these first flaps. After weeks of tending their egg within the nest, after weeks of feeding their hatchling, after shielding it from spring thunderstorms, their child hen grew daring sufficient to fly — if solely briefly.

All of that nurturing, I spotted, had ended with this scene. My canine thought that one other life was a squeaky toy, a sport. The dad and mom have been propelled to behave however frozen from serving to. And I used to be powerless to assist till it was too late.

My fingers scooped below the tufted wings and impossibly small bones of the infant hen, lifting it from the grass. The ultimate few chirps from the hen answered its dad and mom a couple of yards away. I couldn’t look twice after I caught my first glimpse of the hen’s eyes, shrouded now by its eyelids. I carried the small physique to the trash bin.

Returning to the again door, I noticed the dad and mom once more, crossing paths in flight as they searched the empty yard. They nonetheless known as out, unanswered.

For hours, they remained there, two cardinal dad and mom in a yard vigil that has haunted my week because it runs parallel to our nationwide human tragedies of younger lives shattered.

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