So let me tell you something that happened out back a few weeks ago, and it’s one of those things where nothing dramatic really happens, nobody claps, there’s no big reveal music, but it lands anyway, you know, it settles in somewhere behind your ribs and just sits there.
We’ve got this retention pond behind the house, and most of the year it’s exactly what you’d expect in central Florida, water out to the edges, birds moving through, frogs doing whatever frogs do at three in the morning, and then this year the rain just didn’t show up when it normally does, and the whole thing pulled back and pulled back until it was basically a wide bowl of cracked earth, just dry and open and a little uncomfortable to look at if you’ve gotten used to seeing it full.
And right in the middle of that, dead center like they’d dropped a pin, a pair of sandhill cranes decided that was the place, that exact spot, to build a nest.
Now you see that and you kind of tilt your head a little, because instinctively you’re thinking, that feels wrong, that feels exposed, that feels like you picked the one place with no protection at all, and I found myself watching them every morning with coffee in my hand, standing there on the patio like I was somehow on the oversight committee for crane decision-making, which, just to be clear, I am not qualified for.
They built the nest anyway, and they stayed on it, and they moved with that slow, deliberate pace cranes have, like everything is already decided and they’re just carrying it out, and I kept thinking, okay, maybe they know something, maybe the water comes back gradually and they’re planning for where it will be, not where it is, which sounds very wise until you’re looking at a dry pond that just keeps getting drier.
And then the eggs hatched.
So now you’ve got this tiny chick out there, and if you’ve ever seen one, they’re basically a suggestion of a bird, just this little moving piece of life that feels like it shouldn’t be out in the open like that, and I remember standing there thinking, this is not going to go well, and I hated that thought even as I was having it, because you don’t want to narrate something toward a bad ending.
And then, right on schedule like Florida finally remembered its job, the rain came back.
Not a drizzle, not a gentle return, but real rain, days of it, steady and then heavy and then steady again, and that empty bowl started filling fast, and I lost sight of them completely, the nest disappeared under water, the whole middle of the pond changed shape, and just like that I couldn’t track them anymore.
And here’s the part I don’t love admitting, but it’s true, I assumed the worst.
I figured that was it, that the timing didn’t work, that the instinct that looked questionable at the beginning turned out to be exactly what it looked like, and I stopped looking for them as closely, because once you’ve written the ending in your head, you stop scanning the horizon the same way.
A few mornings went by like that, just normal mornings, coffee, the usual routine, and then one day I walked out and there they were again, off to one side where the water had settled into a new edge, and I had that half-second of recognition where your brain catches up to your eyes.
And between them, moving around like it had always been there, was one chick.
Just one, small, very much alive, being fed, being nudged along, doing that quick, uncertain stepping that young birds do, and the parents were calm in that same way they’d been calm the whole time, like nothing had ever been off, like this was always how it was going to unfold.
And I stood there longer than I needed to, just watching them, feeling this ridiculous wave of relief over something that had absolutely nothing to do with me, and also everything to do with me, because I had filled in the gap with my own conclusion, and I had been wrong.
So that’s it, really.
A dry pond, a nest that didn’t make sense to me, rain that came late and then all at once, and a chick that made it through a part of the story I couldn’t see, because I stopped looking right when the important part was happening.
And I don’t have a clean lesson for you, I’m not going to wrap it up with something neat and motivational, I’m just telling you what I saw, because sometimes that’s enough.
They trusted something I couldn’t see, and the thing they trusted showed up.
