My Little Miracle

My little Miracle isn’t what you might think it is. Actually, “it” is a she and she is a bird. That’s right. I said a bird. She is a cockatiel. When we first met she was in a plastic lunch bag. She was a small puff ball of gray feathers. I gently took her out and she lay quietly in my hands. It was friendship at first sight.

So how did she happen to get into the lunch bag? Well it turns out that a family of rowdy boys found her at their school and put her in the bag and took her home. They wanted to keep her and named her Taco. Yeah Taco, I hate it too. But the rowdy boys’ mother was having none of that. She told one of the other mothers. It just so happened that the other mother lives at the end of our block. She was home the day before when my husband accidentally let our bird out. My husband searched and told all of the neighbors. He was even more upset because my father had a serious accident just 17 days before and I was already overwhelmed.

Sunny was gone in a minute, too afraid to find his way back. My husband was devastated and I was very sad. How many times did I hear my husband say, “Be careful of leaving the door open, or the bird might get out.” Ironically he was the one who did.

So I was one bird short when the doorbell rang the next day. There appeared the smiling faces of the rowdy boys, the neighbor and the mother. The mother said, “My son found your bird.” I was thrilled until I opened the bag and saw the puff ball of gray. “That’s not him” I said softly. I thought how odd it was that the neighbor confused a white and yellow bird with this gray puffball in the plastic lunch bag.

But it was the way that the little puff ball snuggled down in my hands that made me say, “I’ll foster her until we find the owner.” We called the police and made a report about finding the bird. The mother didn’t really want to leave the bird with me, but I wasn’t about to let the rowdy boys take her or have her put in a shelter. After all, a lost bird is almost never found and I had just bought a large bag of cockatiel food.

Well, Sunny was never returned to us despite ads and an amber alert to shelters. And a year later my little puff ball is still with me, giving me birdie kisses. However, she has grown into a beautiful 2 tone gray, with white markings on her wings, dappled white legs like stockings and a blend of white, gray and yellow tail feathers. She now has a large patch of yellow on the back of her head. It’s almost as if she is trying to look a little more like Sunny.

Her big bright eyes look at me and she stretches her wings in anticipation of coming out of her cage to spend time with me. She is my companion and my little buddy. She goes wherever I am in the house. She likes to get head rubs and snuggle into my hands and get kisses. She is a little bundle of love.

So you can certainly see why she is my little miracle. She came to me when I most needed her and I was there when she most needed me. The universe looks out for us I think. Oh and by the way I named her Miracle.