Chickadees are my very favorite bird.
So I treasured the chickadee birdhouse my daughter Lori gave me for Mother’s Day. My husband, George, hung it in a tree in our yard where I could watch the little birds perch and nest in it.
Unfortunately, that summer, a violent storm split the tree where the house hung. Side boards were blown off. The roof dangled sideways. The little house was destroyed. I couldn’t bear to throw my gift out, so I put it in the shed. That’s where George and I found it a year later when we were doing some spring cleaning.
“Such a shame,” I said, holding it up. “There were chicks nesting in it when it fell too.”
Looking at the broken house I felt sad for the chickadees all over again. One day their family was safe and in their cozy house. The next the house was in ruins and they were scattered and lost. Did they ever find each other again? Lord, I hope you protected their family when that little house couldn’t, I thought.
I heard a car in the driveway. A moment later Lori poked her head into the shed. “I was showing a house in the area,” she explained. Lori was a real-estate broker, but an artist at heart.
“Is that the birdhouse I gave you?” Lori examined it.
“It’s beyond fixing,” said George.
Lori nodded thoughtfully. “Mom, you need a new house for chickadees. One a storm can’t damage.”
“I don’t think they make any birdhouse as strong as that,” I said.
In November of that same year, our family was rocked by a storm far worse than the one that destroyed the birdhouse. Our beautiful and talented daughter was killed in a car accident. Now I was the one who felt lost and scattered, my world in ruins. We made funeral arrangements and attended the service as if in a fog, relying on the kindness of family and friends to get us through.
But when it came to cleaning out Lori’s house, George and I thought we should do that ourselves. Every item brought a memory with it. The clothing we’d shopped for together. The journals Lori kept and often read to me from, sharing funny stories. And all her paintings.
“These must be the ones she was working on for her show,” I said to George when we came across a stack of canvases: “The Collection of Homes.” Leave it to Lori to find a way to combine her interests. Whenever she sold a house she sketched it and presented it to the new owners as a gift. It had given her the idea to do a collection of homes in oil paints. I hadn’t seen much of the work, but she’d kept me updated on how she was doing.
Now Lori’s paintings leaned against the wall, never to be finished. I wasn’t ready to look at them yet. We loaded the canvases in the back of the car along with Lori’s journals and other personal items. George and I had a quiet ride and pulled up in our driveway. Nothing seemed right. Our house looked secure as ever on the outside, but it might as well have been as shattered as my chickadee birdhouse. Could any family recover from a blow like this?
We stored Lori’s things in an extra bedroom. Maybe one day I’ll be able to look at them, I thought as I closed the door behind me. But not today.
In the months after Lori’s death the numbness faded, replaced by the pain of losing her. I missed her phone calls and surprise visits. I joined a grief support group. The counselor suggested I write Lori a letter, telling her all the things I wished I could say to her now. I wrote letter after letter. I even wrote a letter from Lori to me. In it she told me how happy she was in heaven. In heaven everyone was safe and protected. But here on earth, in the ruins of my grief, I couldn’t imagine feeling safe or protected anywhere. Not when my child was blown out there where I could never find her.
One evening as I was writing another letter to Lori, I remembered the stories she used to write in her journal. She’d had me in stitches as she read them to me. I went to the extra bedroom and dug one of them out. Lori wrote about her art show, the homes she was selling, times spent with her friends. One line in an entry jumped out at me: “I finished Mom’s chickadee birdhouse,” it read.
“My birdhouse?” I said. Had she bought me a replacement? The old one was still sitting in our shed. George and I hadn’t found any birdhouse at Lori’s. I puzzled over the entry for the next few days. It felt as if someone was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand what. Then I had an idea.
“George, let’s look at Lori’s artwork,” I said one evening.
The paintings were still stacked against the wall in the spare bedroom. We flipped through them: cottages with flowery walkways, two-story homes with elaborate landscaping. Then, tucked between a cozy Dutch colonial and a sleek split-level, I found a small oil painting. A wooden birdhouse like the one that had hung from a tree in our garden was balanced on top of a pole, surrounded by pink, yellow and blue flowers. The little house was the picture of peace and security. No storms would harm this home or the family inside it. Not ever.
“Turn it over,” George said.
I flipped over the painting. There, written in Lori’s handwriting, was one word: Mom.
I remembered Lori’s words: You need a home a storm can’t damage. The kind of home Lori had in heaven. One day I would join her there. Until then I had reassurance, painted by Lori herself, that she was safe under God’s protection.
