The Yellow Bird

pleasantness, she could drowse for long moments. The. fo~gotten things in the dump were arranged in piles. It was fascinating to her that each of these things now strewn so carelessly about had been part of someone's life. Here was an old ink bottle, or a smashed-in coffee pot with vestiges of grounds still in the nose. There was an old chicken incubator, with a red lisht bulb, painted with the stains of its long gone chicks. N ext to it she had found a broken china doll, part of a musical lamp which played a few tinkly notes as she picked it up to hug the doll. . She always sought out a wicker baby buggy, made for twins, which had come in one of the last loads. She loved its round straw edging, furled like an Ostrich feather. It didn't daunt her that the handle was half gone. "Poor thing," she would say. "Were your twins boys or girls?" In the center of the rubble heaps was a deep grown-over pond bed which her friends told her had been a lake at one time; ducks had come each summer and children could ice skate in the winter. Cautiously she would descend, with wild cherry branches snapping smartly against her legs, blackberry vines clawing at her dress. Standing in the pond bed she would dig with her stick searching for one last puddle of water that might not have dried up, yearning silently for the ducks and the cold, blue-white frozen surface over which she could skim in winter. But the shadows quickly passed from her face, and she climbed panting out of the pit into the hot and comforting sunshine. She sensed that time had passed, and soon Mother would be calling. Before she returned, though, she must make her rounds. With excitement pressing against her chest she made a complete circle of the grounds. She poked everything, searching in all corners, hoping that from the rusty cans and broken bottles she could find something growing, sending forth fresh, green tendrils of life. N early always she found it: waxy orange pumpkin blossoms springing from seeds of some smashed Jack-O-Lantern, small hard squash beginning to form on luxuriant green vines, a solitary zinnia standing tall among soggy, l1nre~d newspapers. Bt~t one day, best of all, she had discovered growing out of the gapl11g mouth of a furnace pipe a pink wild rose which filled her with wonder and sent her singing along the path home.