Edgar still comes every morning.
Seven-fifteen. Right on time. Rain or snow or sunshine. He lands on the back railing and clicks his beak and waits.
Birdie leaves the peanuts herself now. She doesn’t need me to help anymore. She lines them up in a perfectly straight row on the railing, one at a time, and then she sits on the top porch step in her pajamas and talks to him while he eats. About first grade. About her friend Maya. About the stuffed crow named Edgar Junior and the stuffed kitten that doesn’t have a name yet because she can’t decide.
Sometimes she talks to him about her daddy.
Edgar listens. He always listens.
Some mornings now, there are two crows on the railing. Edgar brought a friend. Dr. Ruiz says it’s probably his mate. Birdie named her Lenore.
And some mornings, when I look out the kitchen window, I can see four houses down to the back fence of 402 Larkspur Lane. There’s a brand-new wooden bird feeder hanging there now. Full of seed. Sparrows crowding all over it.
And standing next to it in his cardigan, with a cup of coffee and no clipboard, is Harold Dennison. Just watching them.
Last week, on a cold Tuesday morning, Edgar left one more gift on the porch railing.
Birdie saw it first. She came running into the kitchen in her socks, holding it up in her fist, so excited she could barely talk.
“Mommy! Mommy, look!”
She opened her hand.
It was a tiny pink plastic butterfly wing. The piece that had broken off her hair clip in the dark, inside the pipe, the day she got lost.
Somehow, Edgar had gone back for it. Back down into that gully, back to the culvert, maybe before the grate went up, maybe slipping through the bars after. I’ll never know how. I’ll never know when.
He’d been holding onto it this whole time. Waiting to bring it home.
Birdie carried it upstairs very carefully in both hands. She took the mason jar down from her windowsill and set it on her bed. She took out every treasure, one by one, and lined them up on her blanket. The bottle caps. The blue button. The green sea glass. The tiny brass key. The pearl earring. And the little pink butterfly clip with one wing missing.
Then she held the broken wing up next to the clip, fitting them together.
She put them both in the jar. Right in the middle. Right where she could see them.
Then she screwed the lid back on and set the jar on the windowsill, where the morning sun came through the glass and lit everything up gold.
She stood back and looked at it with her hands on her hips.
“Now it’s complete,” she said.
Outside, on the back railing, a big black crow bobbed his head once and flew up into the cottonwood tree.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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