Dear Wigleaf,

Summer is ending again, and again I'm thinking of the shrikes that once nested by the railroad tracks in a place I no longer live.

In Germany, shrikes are "nine-killers," said to catch nine prizes before they will eat one. The shrikes I knew had chosen a locust tree for its thorns, to keep their impaled larder of insects and mice.

That first summer, a fledgling appeared, a puff of down in a tangle of wild clematis. Both parents flew in to feed it, the mother bird marbled brown, the father bird with his black mask and rusty cape.

I don't like say how the following summers went. How the next year only the father bird returned, chased fat hooded crows from the locust tree, flaunted grasshopper bouquets in his beak as he balanced on the wires, scree-call audible above the trains. Unanswered.

And the summer after that. The wires empty.

What I want to say is how, that first summer, when all the leaves were bursting their deepest green just before they would wither, the mother and father birds began calling, the fledgling began calling back, and in a blink, they all whisked south along the tracks on their long flight down to Africa, three beating shapes that flickered into points, into sky, so that now there is a permanence pierced into me, the way it is always gone and yet always is happening, the instant those birds took wing.

Yours,

E