Spring invites such promise and hope. It’s a time of birth and rebirth, and when a pair of finches began building a nest on the inside lip of our front porch, my wife and I were thrilled. It was just a matter of days before we heard the peeping of baby birds greeting the world.

After a particularly challenging winter—harsh weather and harsher headlines—we welcomed the notion of new life. Over a week or two of birdsong, Mom and Dad fed their newborns and taught them how to navigate life before nudging them from the nest and into the world. Many mornings, we sat outside with our coffee and watched from the corner of our eye as we read. The nest was a sturdy architecture of stick and brush, resting atop a vacant wasps’ nest, of all things. Perhaps it was the ideal foundation, or a message to predators: Don’t mess with our nest.

The morning we first heard the baby birds’ cries was heartwarming. We opted to give Mom and Dad space and stay inside, attempting to sneak a peek from the window on our landing. My wife even dug out our binoculars, despite the nest being no more than ten feet from the window. We spotted a head or two bobbing above the top of the nest and, of course, heard the unmistakable sound of hungry babies, seeking the sustenance that only their parents could provide.

Perhaps that’s where things went wrong. At some point, Mom and Dad must’ve left their babies unattended, because a hush came over the nest. We weren’t sure who the perpetrator was, but we assumed it was a blue jay since we see a lot of them in our yard. For all their regal beauty, blue jays can be real jerks. I was attacked More than once at our home in Decatur by a possessive blue jay who thought my presence was a threat to her nest. Respecting the nests of others should be a given, but—until further evidence is offered—we are placing blame for this tragic disappearance at the three-toed feet of the Cyanocitta cristata.

While we never saw what happened, the nest’s silence was deafening, and the heartbreak of seeing Mom and Dad return to the nest and cry out for their babies was unshakeable.

As I watched them—their bewilderment, their sadness—I thought about how half-empty the metaphoric glass has felt for quite some time. I felt it for myself, but also for so many people I love and so many whom I read about in the news each day. The unhoused people at the mission down the street from us. The barefoot man outside of Walmart with a handwritten sign and most of his possessions in a grocery cart. Discouragement, it seemed, had become my default mode after a lifetime of being fairly hopeful.

I carried that grim assessment around with me for a day or two. After all, I wasn’t finding much evidence to the contrary. Perhaps hard times and brutal truths were just the order of the day going forward. Perhaps I needed to shift my state to one slightly harder, a bit less hopeful. It was, after all, pragmatic to anticipate the worst, right? That’s how our ancestors survived, after all. Expect the tiger beyond the trees, the bear behind every bush.

Then, I went outside with my book and coffee on Saturday morning, and there the father bird was. Still mourning his lost children, he flew from our porch to the wire above our driveway. There, he began to sing the loveliest of songs. It wasn’t a dirge, but a melodious recital. If one didn’t know his backstory, they might think it was a song of pure joy. Aware of his pain, what I heard was a song of defiant hope. A sound etched in a belief that he must do what he was put here to do: sing. And then, take flight.

And so he did. And with him went my notion that life is out to get us. That harsh lie was replaced by a song. A promise to myself: Sing, despite it all. ❧

Tommy Housworth is a professional writer, creative director for corporate projects, a certified mindfulness instructor and the author of two collections of short stories. A Sense of Wonder is his Substack column.