French Juniper - Juniper: the girl who was born too soon

Fallen creatures should not always be rescued. I have always known that, and yet. When I was fourteen, a friend offered me a baby bird, cupped in her palms. Shed found it among the pine needles in the Florida horse pasture where we spent our days.

His body was a blue heap of twigs wrapped in rice paper, threaded with veins and sugared with fuzz. His bobblehead teetered on a stalk of a neck, and his sealed eyes bulged blindly. His mouth was a gaping maw of need.

He was exotic and thrilling. In my suburban backyard, I had defended the naked rat babies in the compost pile from the threat of my fathers shovel, begged for the lives of the raccoon family in the attic. Id raised stray kittens in the garage, puppies in the family room, and bunnies on the back porch. So that day, when my mom picked me up, I climbed into her old red Ford Falcon holding a shoe box and not expecting her to object. My parents had plenty of flaws, but their gift to me was the freedom to explore.

I was finishing my freshman year of high school. I was awkward and often alone. I knew this bird was, in the scheme of things, not special. But his heart fluttered in my hands. I carried him into the living room and set him up in an old, cracked aquarium I found in the garage. I put in a branch or two from the magnolia in the yard, a sad attempt to make his habitat more natural.

Its probable that someone asked what was the point. Even if I saved him, he couldnt live in our house, like a parakeet, and he couldnt go free. Those were distant concerns. I soaked chicken feed in warm water and offered it every couple of hours in a syringe. It slid down his throat with a satisfying glug. I felt the divide between the civilized and the wild. Wasnt I barely civilized myself, always bumping into invisible boundaries, finding the shape of the world? I was powerless in the halls at school, powerless over my too-big teeth, my disobedient hair, and my dad, who decapitated the baby rats in the compost pile, blasted the raccoons out of the attic with a Remington twelve-gauge, sold my puppies, gave away my bunnies, and took my kittens to the pound.

This birds small life, whatever it would become, was in my hands. I would protect him as long as I could. The next day, his lashless eyes peeled open. The first thing he saw was me, staring at him through the glass.

The bird grew fast. He sprouted feathers in tufts and stalks. He morphed into a bright, squawking blue jay. He lived in my bedroom, far enough from the main living area of the house that I got away with it, for a while. He perched on my ceiling fan, and I put the daily