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    Nest. Flight. Sky.: On love and loss, one wing at a time
    Nest. Flight. Sky.: On love and loss, one wing at a time
    Nest. Flight. Sky.: On love and loss, one wing at a time
    Ebook41 pages25 minutes

    Nest. Flight. Sky.: On love and loss, one wing at a time

    By Beth Kephart

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    About this ebook

    In Nest. Flight. Sky: On Love and Loss, One Wing at a Time, award-winning memoirist Beth Kephart returns to the form for the first time in years to reckon with the loss of her mother and a slow-growing but soon inescapable obsession with birds and flight. Kephart finds herself drawn to the startle of the winter finch, the quick pulse of hummingbirds, and the hungry circling of hawks. She discovers birds in the stories she tells and the novels she writes. She hunts for nests, she waits for song, she seeks the stories of bird artists, she waits. Nest. Flight. Sky. is about the love that endures and the hope that saves us. It’s about the gift of feathers. Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of 16 books, an adjunct faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania, a frequent memoir workshop leader, and the strategic writing partner in a boutique communications firm. Small Damages, a young adult novel that takes place in southern Spain, was named to many best of 2012 lists and is a Carolyn W. Field Honor Book. Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir has received starred reviews and was featured in O magazine. Kephart is a National Book Award finalist, a National Endowment for the Arts grant winner, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts winner, a Speakeasy Poetry Prize winner, and a featured author in the Philadelphia Literary Legacy exhibition. She has written reviews and essays for the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Salon.com, Millions, the Huffington Post, the Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, and many others. She writes a monthly column on place for the Philadelphia Inquirer and has an award-winning blog. Going Over, Kephart’s novel about Berlin in 1983, will be released by Chronicle in April 2014. You can find her blog at http://beth-kephart.blogspot.com/ and follow her @BethKephart on Twitter. This is a short e-book published by Shebooks--high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women. For more information, visit http://shebooks.net.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShebooks
    Release dateJan 28, 2014
    ISBN9781940838120
    Nest. Flight. Sky.: On love and loss, one wing at a time
    Author

    Beth Kephart

    Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of books for both adults and young readers, including Going Over, You Are My Only, Small Damages, and Handling the Truth. She lives in Devon, Pennsylvania.

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      Book preview

      Nest. Flight. Sky. - Beth Kephart

      www.shebooks.net

      My mother passed away from this world one single wing beat at a time.

      It was winter. We had brought her home, to a room built of windows, orchids, and hymns, the rinsed sounds of my brother’s recorder. The hard work of the misdiagnosis was behind her. The ill-timed stroke, the slow withdrawal of language and hope.

      We give peace to the dying. We bring them home.

      I was walking the dark streets of my own neighborhood when the news came. The deer stood in the shadows between houses. A fox broomed the road with its tail. The moon was—I don’t remember. This story would not be true if I said that I remember the shape and the weight of that moon.

      What I do remember is how, in that dark, alone except for the deer and the fox and the stars, I felt a nudge on my left side, just beneath the blade of my shoulder. I felt a nudge and then I heard a disturbance in the cold, black air above, a quick whoosh. I stood very still. Mom? I started to run—down one street and around a corner and up the slight hill to my own house, an old house on a barely lit street. The phone in my kitchen was ringing.

      She’s gone, my father said.

      I know, I said. I just felt her say goodbye.

      * * *

      It was the end of December. It was a new year. It was not yet spring. I work in a square room, watch the world (a garden like an archipelago, a museum of flowering trees) through two wide windows. I work early in the day, a bare bulb turned on, and I work alone. But in the months after my mother passed away, much too early, the finches came. They were still wearing their winter coats. They favored the crack of dawn. They held themselves up with the acrobatics of their wings, touched their beaks to my wide windows, and hammered.

      As if they were trying to break in, I thought. As if they were trying to break through. As if their hammer and tap were the dits and dahs of a telegraph, a message hurried from sky to here.

      Stay awake.

      Stay alive.

      I am near.

      I abandoned my work and watched the finches. I looked beyond them—toward the hibernating garden and the tight-nubbed trees. The birds tapped, I stood, I listened: dits and dahs. The shenanigans went on—weeks—until

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