Our favorite commenter on Rex’s blog, egs (short for egsforbreakfast) got me scared yesterday referring to himself as having cancer. I should have known better. He was playing with the puzzle theme: TOUCANS — phrases that had “can” in them twice. Egs’s note said: This will be short as I’m having a cancer scan. I should have listened to the Canadian canards about eating Cancun pecans I guess.

Barbara S. dazzled us with a different sort of note. I’m going to share it, in its entirety. It has nothing I can see that relates to the puzzle (altho it’s about birds and toucans are birds). She just had a story she wanted to tell, and (correctly) felt the (mostly) friendly lunatics who read Rex’s blog on the puzzle would enjoy it.

Over the past few weeks, my husband and I have been godparents to a family of robins who have been nesting on our front porch. They built the nest in the early spring and we got quite excited about our new tenants, but then they abandoned their construction and disappeared. I guess they found a nesting site they liked better for their first brood of the season. But then, around 10 July, they came back and started reinforcing the nest. Woo-hoo, we’re going to get some avian action, after all! The mom laid four eggs but, sadly, according to one of our eagle-eyed neighbors, one was stolen by a crow. (I like crows for their astonishing intelligence, but it’s no wonder they call them in groups “a murder.”)

Mom-robin was the soul of patience as she sat incubating those eggs. Our neighbors are having their driveway, front walkway and back patio replaced, and she had to carry out her vigil through the sounds of jackhammers and stonecutting saws – what a cacophony! I found it interesting that although she mostly sat there quite motionless, she did feel free to fly off for brief forays, presumably to eat. (It was during one of these absences, of course, that the crow struck.)

Then, one day, we noticed both parents sitting on the edge of the nest and looking down into it. Hah – that could mean only one thing: baby birds have hatched! Then began the non-stop feeding ritual, in which both parents seemed to participate equally. They flew in and out of our porch at Mach-speed. If you happened to be out there near the flight-path, your hair could practically get singed.

The little birds grew until first beaks and then bodies were visible over the sides of the nest. We were surprised that there was no chirping in the early days of feeding – it seems it takes a few days for the babies to find their voice. Hatchlings are really not an attractive sight and their open beaks seem to be the same size as the rest of them. But how quickly they passed through that stage and turned into little speckled buddhas sitting stolidly in a row, waiting for their next meal.

And then one early morning before I was up, one of them fell out of the nest. Code yellow! Red alert! Battle stations! The dear little thing was unhurt and my husband popped it back in, after first determining that this action wouldn’t jeopardize the viability of the family. Apparently, robins don’t have a particularly good sense of smell so aren’t able to detect human interference. And, indeed, feeding went on in the normal fashion after that. Then, the next day, the little blighter fell out again, but this time, when my husband went to retrieve it, it flew a short distance. It flew! Good grief, how can that be? A mere two weeks ago, it was an egg!

The second chick departed soon after that, leaving one lonely hold-out in the nest. We understand that, for a time, the parents feed the fledglings on the ground, and were a bit afraid that in their zeal to find the departees, they might forget about the remaining nester. Early this morning, my husband looked out and that last chick was perched on the edge of the nest, looking around, and presumably closely considering its next move. A little later a parent arrived with food and found that chick…gone! Poof, vanished, out into the big wide world.

So, sniff, my husband and I are empty-nesters. We’ve been utterly riveted at all stages of the family’s development, and can’t wait to see if the nest will be used again.

It elicited many “thank you for sharings” and this comment from long-time commentariat member Nancy: Barbara S. — Your wonderfully evocative comment makes me feel once again an emotion that I, a lifelong New Yorker, have too often experienced on this blog: Nature envy. You see, I have to walk to my Nature in Central Park. Nature doesn’t come to me. And it certainly doesn’t hang around for weeks and months at a time, revealing itself slowly in fascinating stages and progressions.

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Tippi Hedren and Melanie Griffith are both beautiful women. TH is 95, kinehora, living in New Ulm MN, and MG, her daughter, just turned 68 a few days ago. She (Mel) was married to Antonio Banderas for close to 20 years. And Melanie is mom to another knockout, Dakota Johnson. But Antonio is not Dakota’s dad — Don Johnson is. Mel was married to him twice, 13 years apart. Mel did have a child with Antonio — Stella. Time to throw some faces at you. Tippi, Mel, and Antonio with Stella.

This all comes up because it was Hitchcock’s birthday this week. Like most moviegoers I was a fan. But when I learned how abusive he was to Tippi Hedren, well, he can go fuck himself in his grave. He played in the same playground as Harvey Weinstein. Hedren rebuffed him but he abused her terribly for years, treating her like a possession, and obsessing over her. Is it so hard to appreciate beauty, cherish and protect it? Shouldn’t that be the natural response?

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Will report on our excellent VT getaway next time. Thanks for popping in, Chatterheads!