Feeding the Gulls

When infirmity creeps into the lives of those we love it's painfully clear that loss is a perpetual theme. There are losses of things we all tend to take for granted; the ability to dress, bathe, or ambulate without assistance from others, for example. Then there are losses of prior interests like reading, long walks, gardening, and entertaining even if it's just a cup of tea and a cookie. Life becomes smaller, more restricted and narrowed. Not having experienced this myself I speak as an observer. It's painful to watch; must be even more painful to live.

Mom still enjoys animals and I suspect she always will; the wild and the domesticated. Come one, come all. At least once a week, she and caregiver Catie drive down to the Ballard Locks with a loaf of bread, tear it into pieces and watch as the gulls summon each other in raucous caws to the woman who brings them sustenance that day. Despite the occasional dirty look from someone who views the gulls as winged nuisances in contrast to her love of their spirited attention, she ignores these people and continues to take delight. For this, I'm grateful.

I found this poem yesterday which captures the idea quite nicely.

A Woman Feeding Gulls

by David Wagoner

They cry out at the sight of her and come flying
Over the tidal flats from miles away,
Sideslipping and wheeling
In sloping gray-and-white interwoven spirals
Whose center is her
And the daily bread she casts downwind on the water
While rising to spread her arms
Like wings for the calling of still more gulls around her,
Their cries intermingling at the end of daylight
With the sudden abundance
Of this bread returning after the hungry night
And the famine of morning
And the endlessly hungry opening and closing
Of wings and arms and shore and the turning sky.

"A Woman Feeding Gulls" by David Wagoner from Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. © University of Illinois Press, 1999.