Making Lemonade

The cut grass had been sitting there on the lawn long enough to dry, like a kind of hay. We were gathered between the stream and the enormous spruce which sometimes served as our secret hideout: my best friend, her sisters, and I. “Let’s make birds’ nests,” I said. I was the one who had to come up with a game we all could play. Otherwise my best friend wanted to play only with me, her little sister tried to join in, and their elder sister would go off and do her own thing.

So we scooped the hay into piles, or picked it up in handfuls. Shaped it into doughnut rings, with bottoms. Worked together to build large nests that could hold several of us. Abundant shade made the heat of the day bearable, and the sun seemed to sparkle on the running water as we spun in circles, tossing hay in the air just to watch it catch the light as it fell.

I built one nest on my own, shaped carefully to match the ones I had seen under the eaves of my grandparents’ house. I lined it with fresh grass to make it soft, and placed a leaf to look as if it might be sheltering an egg.

“Wow,” said the older sister. “You’ll have real birds fighting over that nest. They’ll want to use it.”

I don’t know if she meant it literally, or was simply trying to convey a compliment, but even then I knew better. It looked good, but there was nothing holding it together. If you tried to make it into something more, it would come apart as if it never had been.