Pictures of Starling in the Window Plus a Few Words

There's something delicate about her hands--her slender, little fingers; for all their graceful length, still nothing but small. I admire them now as much as I ever did when I would slide my index finger, marveling, into her tiny newborn grasp. Though back then, of course, she didn't have a scratch on her index finger, sparkly, blue paint--the remnants of some creative endeavor--smudged here and there across her left hand, and a faint red stamp on her right. ("What's this?" I ask her--trying to make out the image on the stamp. "It's just nuffing," she responds.)

At the moment she's stretched out on my lap--examining my own hands with her small ones. She extends my fingers open in front of her and begins twisting my wedding ring round and round in its eternal loop, eventually stopping with the diamond turned in towards the palm side of my hand. I twist it back. Then she twists it again. We repeat this for a few moments before I pretend my diamond has gone missing; then feign surprise to discover it where she'd last turned it on the underside of my finger.

Then she moves on--asking about some dried blood in a split on my knuckle, and examining my other fingers with mild curiosity. 

"Is this your pinky fum?" she asks me--pulling on my thumb.

"That's just my thumb," I tell her. "This smaller one is my pinky."

"I just want to call it your pinky fum," she says with finality.

She lets me do her hair now. For the entirety of her life it has been a battle not worth fighting. Then one day, about two weeks ago, she held her hair up and over the crown of her head, pondered for a moment then said, "Mom, I want necklace hair." And now, nearly every morning, she agrees to ponytails, braids, or "necklace hair". With this surprising turn of events one might even dare hope she'll be open to wearing one or two things other than ... the one or two she wears.

I love this little Starling bird of ours. 

The End.