Tell Me A Story: THE EMPTY NEST

Marcia Norwood
America's STORYTELLER
Telling Untold Stories in Photographs, Prose and Public Speaking

The Empty Nest

A STORYTELLER Gift Booklet
Gifts of Inspiration
That Encourage and Inspire

Story Synopsis:

“The Empty Nest” is a story about a robin’s nest in our front yard that was discovered in the spring of 2008, by three of my own fledglings that came…out of season…to fill my empty nest.

The Empty Nest

This is a story about a robin’s nest in our front yard that was discovered in the spring of 2008, by three of my own fledglings that came…out of season…to fill my empty nest.

“Hurry up! Get in the van. Everything’s packed. If we leave now we’ll be at the Precious Moments Chapel in Carthage, before noon.” I barked directions to my three girls: Sarah, Faith and Megan.

“Wait, Mom. Look at this!” Our 13-year old daughter, Sarah, pointed to our little Blue Spruce tree, a couple of feet from our Nissan Quest: “Pleeeeeease, Mom. Peek inside the tree.”

The little Blue Spruce, barely five feet tall, stood in our front yard in Blue Springs, Missouri: next to our sidewalk…near the street. I walked past it several times every day and until then, never noticed anything out of the ordinary.

“Look!” squealed our nine-year old granddaughter, Megan, with delight.

“Shhh…” gently cautioned our other 13-year old daughter, Faith. “You don’t want to scare her.”

I pushed my face closer to the silvery-blue needles. There…inside a fork between two branches of our little Blue Spruce, I spied a mama robin, sitting…quite comfortably in her nest of twigs.

I scooped my camera from the van; and snapped a quick photo of Mama, despite the high-pitched alarm call from what must have been Daddy Robin perched in a nearby tree.

“I watched her build the nest,” explained Sarah, as we settled in the van for our road trip to Carthage, Missouri. “She grabbed twigs from all over the yard and flew back and forth to build the nest. Then early this morning I saw three little blue eggs in the nest.”

Sarah Zheng-Kang, was always the first to notice things, even though her sight is limited. Our daughter was blinded by a blunt trauma to her right eye as an infant in China. The injury also caused scarring to her left eye. An official estimated her to be 10 months old when she was discovered alone, in 1994, outside a police station in Changsha (a city in mid-southern China, whose population is over six million) and taken to an orphanage. Sarah was 5 years and 11 months old when we adopted her. She weighed only 36 pounds.

We kept her Chinese name, Zheng-Kang, as her middle name, to honor her Chinese heritage. Someone at the orphanage chose her name, which means health, as a wish that this little blind girl would one day be healthy.

“What took you so long?” Sarah asked me when she learned to speak English. “I had one bowl of rice in the morning and another in the afternoon. I went to bed hungry every night until you came to China to get me.”

My husband, Ed, and I, were both over 50 years old, with two homemade (biological) adult kids and two grandchildren, when God broke our hearts on behalf of the 163 million orphans around the world who wait for Forever Families. We were happy with our empty nest until God ruffled our feathers. We decided to make a difference…one child at a time. Most of our friends and family thought we were crazy to adopt internationally at our age. Ed and I flew to China on our 29^th wedding anniversary in 1999, to adopt our first Chinese daughter, Sarah Zheng-Kang. We returned to China in October 2002, to adopt Faith Fu Ju.

Faith was born with cleft lip and palate. She was two days old when she was abandoned, in 1994, at a railway station in Benxi, a city with over a million people in northern China. She lived alternately at an orphanage and at her foster family’s home, until she was sent to a boarding school for orphans in Beijing.

Faith was eight years old when we adopted her. She was afraid to eat the food we gave her because a boy at her orphanage said her new American parents would poison her. Faith’s next food phase was hording and hiding food: a common "orphanage behavior." There were times she would eat until she threw up if we didn't stop her.

Faith's memories of her life in China, unfolded on their own time-table. Someone at her orphanage gave her the Chinese name: Fu Ju, which means blessing earned after great effort. There were times there wasn’t enough food at the orphanage. Sometimes Aunties (caretakers at the orphanage) used their own meager earnings to buy food for the children. More than once Faith went without food for several days and ate bugs and paper off the floor.

We kept Fu Ju as her middle name, and gifted her with the name, Faith. Faith means: “the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen,” (Hebrews 11:1, Holy Bible, King James Version). God gave her strength to endure hardships, and a gentle heart that always looks for ways to serve others.

“Do you think the baby robins are born yet?” Faith Fu Ju asked on our car ride home after three days in Carthage.

“Oh! I hope so!” said our granddaughter, Megan Jewell. She was the first one out of the van when I came to a stop in front of our house on Granite Court in Blue Springs.

There…inside a fork between two branches of our little Blue Spruce, were three baby robins. They didn’t look like robins. The nestlings were pink and mostly naked with sparse hairs and scaly-looking spots. Their eyes were closed.

“What shall we name them?” whispered Megan Jewell, who had been kissed with Jewell as her middle name, in honor of her paternal grandfather (my father) Jewell Bush.

Megan was born in 1999, with a form of anemia that requires lifesaving blood transfusions almost every month of her life. Her parents divorced when she was 18 months old and her mother moved to another state. Ed and I promised our son, Benjamin, to help him raise Megan. She knows I am her grandmother, but she calls me “Mom,” like everyone else in our house…because I do lots of mom-things for her.

“Let’s call them Sarah, Faith and Megan!” I suggested.

And so we did. Sarah, Faith, Megan and I watched for the next two weeks as their namesakes opened their eyes, grew feathers, and as they lifted their heads when Mama and Daddy Robin brought them food. Adult robins can make up to 100 feeding visits each day to the nest. Baby robins can eat almost 14 feet of earthworms a day!

One morning I went outside with my camera to photograph the fledglings (birds that are ready to fly) and found an empty nest.

High in a tree above me Daddy Robin was singing. He dive bombed my head, and I followed his flight pattern across the street to our neighbor’s yard. He landed in the grass, and there …bobbing up and down and following right behind him was one of our baby robins. I quickly snapped a photo of them, and then they were lost in my viewfinder.

Once again, Daddy Robin’s song caught my attention. I looked up and saw the speckled spots on the belly of our baby robin, who had…for the first time taken flight and landed in our neighbor’s Redbud tree.

I walked back across the street to wake up Sarah, Faith and Megan, our three miracle girls, who came to our empty nest…out of season.

Both robins and humans are an altricial species. Both require nourishment and are incapable of caring for themselves after hatching or being born. Their young need to be fed and cared for, for a long duration.

I never thought I would be still nourishing little ones in our nest as I approached my 60^th birthday. I’m grateful God trusted me with their care. They help me see -- with child-like faith - little miracles all around: precious moments in my own front yard that I might have been too busy to notice.

The Empty Nest

A STORYTELLER Gift Booklet
Gifts of Inspiration
That Encourage and Inspire

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Marcia Norwood
America's STORYTELLER
Telling Untold Stories in Photographs, Prose and Public Speaking

Tell Me A Story

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Saturday, September 7, 2013

THE EMPTY NEST

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AMERICA'S STORYTELLER, Marcia Norwood