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.
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
The
Empty Nest
Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood
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.”
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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.”
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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 29th 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.
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| Sarah Zheng-Kang, Megan Jewell, Faith Fu Ju - Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
“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.
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
“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!
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
One morning I went outside with my
camera to photograph the fledglings (birds that are ready to fly) and found an
empty nest.
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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.
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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.
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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 60th 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.
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| Sarah, Megan and Faith - Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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| Megan, Sarah and Faith Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
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| Copyright 2008 Marcia Norwood |
