I never know what may meet me over the mountain in the morning. It isn’t the crows anymore—just the sunrise.
Maybe a sliver of yellow light between the bluish peaks and the gray clouds until it’s shoved back by January’s insistence on muted greens and rusts and blacks. Maybe an orange and pink blaze I wouldn’t notice catching the branches of the distant oaks if I weren’t walking the dog up the trail that is cut into the side of the hill behind our house.
This path is a treat for my herding dog, Annie, because it leads into the woods and the place where the snow has been melted down to dead pine needles by the bodies of sleeping deer. I don’t follow her eager snout that sniffles and snuffles farther along into the towering pines. Instead, I stand on the ledge-like trail and watch that great orange and pink sunrise sputter in the white mist that crawls below the peak and through the tired treetops.
Yet, my dog thinks me generous on this cold morning. We’ve walked beyond the usual early morning point of “do your business while I stand shivering in my fuzzy robe and muck boots.” Annie could likely do without me, though. The mountains would feed her. She once dragged an entire deer leg down into the backyard beside my garden. The leg was nearly bare bone, and yet, a grisly feast, offered by an unseen hand—not willingly given by the deer, but provided nonetheless.
I wonder if the blue jays think I’m generous as they rob the raw peanuts I’ve scattered across the front yard for the crows.
Before western North Carolina flooded in September—the Great Flood, I think we may call it when we are very old—there was a murder in our front yard. Of crows, I mean—a beautiful family of them. I imagined the adults telling the young ones to remember my face, attached to the hand that scattered food the year before. And the year before that. They would all wait until the coast was clear, wait until one had given the CAW, CAW, CAW—come, come, come . . . take, and eat—then swoop down from different directions and onto the grass just in front of our log cabin.
Now, only two crows come each day, and I wonder what happened to the others. Did they die when our trees—hundreds of them—toppled northward along the hillside that rises up beside our house? Did they sense the coming danger and evacuate while we just sat, clueless, and watched the waters rise?
These two stick close to each other—in the air, in the limbs of the bare oak. From my writing desk by the upstairs window, I spy one hunched against the cold, a mysterious figure beneath a black cloak. The other is a shadow on a nearby branch. They don’t realize that watching them sneak to the ground and break the peanuts with their thick beaks gives me purpose or that following their silly three-toed tracks across the melting snow brings me joy.
They don’t know that my feeding them isn’t purely generosity.
I dream of being the old woman in the mountain holler with the crow perched on her shoulder as she tells flood stories to her great-grandchildren.
But flood or no, the crows don’t need my peanuts any more than the other birds of the air need to “sow or reap or store away in barns” (Matthew 6:26 NIV). The mountains feed them. I once saw a crow flapping high, high up into the branches of a bare black walnut tree with a snake dangling from its beak. No snake is so generous. And, contrary to legend, crows don’t always gift you twigs and stones and shiny things in return for feeding them. I’ve waited in vain and am a little put out.
The floods took so many things. The homes of birds and bears and people. The lives of running deer and entire families.
The waters left things too: wreckage and debris (and God knows what crushed beneath it) that we are hoping the government will clear away because we just don’t have the means, or maybe even the wherewithal nearly five months later. No means for rural families to drive from their homes across the creeks to the main roads to town; feet of silt and mud in basements, over roads, and in the middle of once deeper rivers.
We could have done without such giving. But we will be forever grateful for the flood of generosity from caring people everywhere . . . and from the God who gives and takes away.
I call Annie back to me because the sun has turned the sky a pale yellow. She follows me back down the trail and around to the front of the house. The blue jays reluctantly retreat to a nearby tree to keep an eye on the peanuts.
Near the base of the tree, I spot something sticking out of the grass. It’s a blue jay feather. And suddenly I see the blue, black, and white feathers everywhere. I gather a small bouquet of them, and their beauty gives me joy. But I don’t consider the birds generous. Not purposely, anyway.
Strange how there can be no generosity without loss. Not even for God. The “indescribable gift” of His Son (2 Corinthians 9:15 NIV) required the greatest sacrifice. And every day He blesses us abundantly, so that we not only can give to others but “abound” in good works (2 Corinthians 9:8).
I don’t know if human beings can really give unselfishly. Digging a flood victim’s family photos out of the mud is a generous act. In doing it, we sacrifice our time and bodily strength; but we may also be quick to share our good deeds on Facebook. Maybe our most unadulterated generosity is what we give because God has built it into nature, into both man and beast, into crows and old women—our flesh back to the earth.
The featured image is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Amanda Cleary Eastep is the senior developmental editor at Moody Publishers and the author of the Tree Street Kids series for young readers, 8-12. (She blames Madeleine L’Engle and C.S. Lewis for dashing her mother’s hopes of having a brain surgeon for a daughter.) Amanda writes in a cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina, but she lived most of her life in the Chicago suburbs. She and her husband Dan have eight grown children and a holler full of wild critters. Aside from gathering around the table with her family to eat and laugh, she finds no greater joy than meeting the Creator in His creation.
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