Emily Draws and Amelia Sits on Her Wing Feathers
Nate is presented with a new challenge that may change his life!
We made it through Hurricane Ophelia last weekend with no incidents or tragedies. The only thing that might be called a “problem” was not having as much playtime as usual because of rain and wetness.
But Pearl, precious girl that she is, used her last dry opportunity to take a nice dustbath before the rain came and prevented that particular enjoyable activity! You can hear the raindrop hitting the camellia leaves in this video, but in her sheltered dry spot, Pearl’s persistence pays off!
The chapters this week mark a change in the flow of the plot. From last week, it seemed that if everything would develop just as Amelia had planned and all would arrive at a happy ending. But this week, things appear to be coming to a stop—by Amelia’s choice!
“Well, that is all good to know, but what are the chances that we will every need to use Gracie’s dancing feet to cancel out the effects of The Air Shadows?” asked Bessie.
“I would say—and I believe our friend, The Raven with Blue Eyes—would agree,” cautioned Amelia. “We should never underestimate our adversary. When Emily has finished drawing the French Garden gate, we have no idea what we will find on the other side once Gracie dances to help her open the portal to that world.”
By then, Emily had laid out the major lines of her drawing with white chalk and was beginning to fill in the details with colored pastels.
“I think you will find a beautiful garden in Paris on the other side. It will be one not far from the finest stage in all of France where Gracie will fulfill her promise to Nate,” said Emily. “There she will dance and remember that her first stage was his shoe when she was just a little chick.”
“Those are beautiful colors,” said Pearl. “This will be the most beautiful and wondrous gate anyone has ever seen. It has all of the colors of all of the birds in the world in it.”
“And somewhere in all of those colors,” said Amelia, “You will find the color you have been looking for the most, Pearl. It is the color all hearts are looking for. It is the color of Love.”
“Without any pictures to guide me,” interrupted Emily, “I had to imagine how a gate would look for it to belong in a Parisian garden, and so I used shapes of things found in a garden. I’m almost done now.”
As Emily held her head slightly tilted, she told me. “Following Amelia’s plan, you will need to hang it up on our gate before I finish the last of it while Gracie dances to some French music.”
“Do you think it has to be French music?” I asked everyone.
“I think it will help me to get in the mood,” said Gracie.
“And me too,” said Emily.
“Let’s not take chances,” said Amelia. “Now no one say anything else, or we will sound like a flock of scatterbrained starlings.”
I brought out The Record Player with a stack of albums and looked through them until I found one I thought would work. It had a collection of musical compositions by Claude Debussey and included one of my favorites titled “Syrinx.”
“This is perfect,” said Gracie. It has a flute in it just like the first song we ever heard on The Record Player.”
“And it’s our syrinx that makes us such great singers,” said Pearl. “Let me get warmed up, and I’ll show you.”
“Not right now, Pearl, if you don’t mind,” everyone said together.
“I do not intend to be an interruption to getting on with what we must do,” said Gracie’s Wren, “but I think it is very important that The Garden remain protected once we have gone through the gate to Paris.”
“It would be the perfect time for the Air Shadows to appear and take over The Garden,” said Amelia. “We might come back to pure desolation and find that Our Healing Tree had been destroyed.”
“That is not completely correct,” said Bessie. “While you were away, The Raven told us that The Healing Tree is for whatever Nate loves and brings him joy, and that means it is more Nate’s tree, and not ours as birds, or even as chickens.”
“Then the survival of The Healing Tree and The Garden are both part of a much bigger plan which we can only see in part, but which we must trust and dare to take a leap of faith to preserve them both,” said Emily.
“That should be quite simple,” added Amelia. “Especially for those of us who have already taken a leap of faith. But there is one of us who has yet to do that. Yes, there is one more who still needs to take their first leap of faith.”
Amelia looked around at the other chickens and the songbirds who had gathered around us until at last her eyes gazed directly into mine.
“You need to understand one very important thing, Nate. There was a promise that you made, and since it is your promise, it is up to you to decide how to keep it,” said Amelia in her most stern voice.
“It is a beautiful promise, and likely the most touchingly beautiful promise that anyone has ever made to a chicken. Nevertheless, you must keep that promise. A promise is not beautiful in the way it sounds, it is beautiful in the way it is kept.
“You must get Gracie to Paris so that she can dance on the grandest stage in the world. You can’t rely on me to fix all your problems even if I am a sentinel. It’s time for you to grow up and stop depending on others to figure things out for you. That is what got you into this predicament with your uncle.
“I’m simply not going to do it any longer. I will work with you, but I will not work for you or instead of you,” she said and looked away from me and across the garden to the tree stump covered with ivy where the box turtles visited. I felt alone and abandoned.
“All along, Gracie has been preparing for how she will keep her promise to you, how she will dance on the grandest stage in all the world and then remember that her very first stage was your shoe.
“She did all that she could to train a corps de ballet from the original flock of chickens. Then as those moved away and were replaced by others, she trained the newer ones. She even did her best to train Pearl who seemed quite untrainable and determined to dance her own free-spirited way. Now, without anyone knowing it, she is working out the choreography for the ballet she plans to present on that golden stage for all the people of Paris, her Rose Garden Princess.
“Have you listened to her as she explained each part? Do you know what she has orchestrated for each number? I doubt that you have. You have left it all to her to direct me and Pearl to operate the puppets from high above in the rafters and to give them the appearance of dancing and supporting the principal dancers?
“There does come a point when my skills are no longer helping you and the flock; we are getting dangerously close to when my skills are hindering you from being who you are supposed to be, and that is against everything that a sentinel is supposed to do.
“So, I am choosing to sit on my wing feathers, and I’m not doing another thing until I know that you have decided to be the hero of your own story, just like Gracie and Bessie, Blanche and Pearl, and Emily and I have all decided before you!
“You do know what The Big Boy at the End of the Street would call you, don’t you? He would call you a chicken, a big, fat, lazy chicken! Not the good kind of chicken, but the worst kind—a chicken who doesn’t keep promises! And believe me, hens know about promises, every egg a hen lays holds the promise of new life.
But do you know what your wren, a Page of The Living Library, called you? He stuck out his little neck as far as he could and told the Head Local Librarian that you were likely the key...THE KEY...to everything because the love you held in your hearts for all of us chickens was what unlocked our gifts.
“Have you dared to stick out your neck for anyone yet? I think not! You are simply going to sit back and wait for someone else to solve everything for you. Well, I for one, am not going to be your problem solver. Keep your own promise to Gracie. The rest of us don't care what else you do. You can forget all the promises you've made to us.
“A promise made by a person only means something to us chickens because of the character of the person who has made the promise. If someone has a weak and worthless character, their promises are meaningless and valueless to us chickens.
“I will say, I am partly to blame for this situation you are in. From the beginning, I have insisted on being treated as a person rather than a chicken. Maybe you have come to think of me as if I was a person, perhaps someone in your family like an aunt or a sister who is older and wiser and able to guide you. But I can’t fill that spot in your life.
“What I can do is to be a sentinel for you and warn you of what I see that you may miss. That is what I am trying to do for you now. You must face your uncle. But before that, you must find a way of convincing yourself that you are more than good enough, just like your grandmother told you and just like you told Gracie. You must travel along your own wild river just as I did until you too feel that you are lost and not afraid.
“There is one more thing that I can try to do for you, and that is to read the scars on your heart left by the hands of others. The Raven with Blue Eyes alerted me to them and said that I was destined to help heal those scars. And now as I look at you, those scars are all I can see. They are just as real as I am real, and you have incorporated them into the stories you have created about us in your journal. You have named them The White Peacock and The Black Heron to hide how they are instruments of The Absence of Love. You must take a leap of faith and release yourself from their power and the power of their lies over you.
“None of us were with you when those scars happened. There was only you and Teddy. I believe with my entire sentinel mind and heart that the part of you needed to face your uncle is hidden away in Teddy and somehow once the two of you have gone through the gate that Emily is drawing, the part of you hidden in Teddy will be able to take a leap of faith back into your heart, and your scars will be healed.”
We are ending here for this week’s installment of our last volume in this series. It does seem like a good place to pause until next week because we see the challenges ahead for Nate. Before this, we have seen Nate helping his chickens to grow, but now Nate must help himself to grow.
Until Next Time
If you have any comments—good or bad—please share them. We are looking forward to sharing with your exactly what happens when our cast of characters journeys through Emily’s Parisian Garden Gate!
Our Best Advice for the Days Ahead: Remember the words of Amelia about the importance of keeping promises. She has definitely spent a good deal of time considering these things which I suppose is quite appropriate for a sentinel like her to do!
Thank you for reading!
John, Gracie, Bessie, Blanche, Pearl, Emily, and Amelia
One could say Amelia is "hen-pecking" Nate to live up to his obligations. I hope he eventually does.
P.S. Is The Healing Tree of the same genus as Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree?
P.P.S. Somehow, when you said "French" music, I pictured Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli rather than Debussy, but whatever works...