The White Feather

Yesterday morning, as I opened the back door to cut some sprigs of oregano from one of the planters along the side of the house, a fluffy white feather floated across my line of sight.

Instead of ignoring it and carrying on, I paused and watched as it gently criss-crossed on thermals of warm air before settling on the ground at my feet. Then I picked it up.

I had a friend growing up who would take things such as this feather as a ‘sign’. She believed in them. Almost as though her life depended on it. Maybe it did. She wasn’t very good at making decisions (not good ones, at any rate) so perhaps she liked to rely on these spiritual messages from God or the Universe or wherever because if whatever information these ‘signs’ delivered her turned out to be wrong, she could blame the sign, sidestepping personal fault.

Clever.

One time, she and her three daughters visited the house I last lived in (and had originally owned) at the tail end of the separation from my last (and final) husband. The atmosphere in the house—which had already been sold, and packing boxes littered the downstairs rooms–was strained when my husband and I occupied the same space, but we’d decided at the outset we’d be grown-up about our split so we didn’t make visitors feel uncomfortable which might cause them to think they’d need to take ‘sides’.

When she came through the door, my friend was flustered and couldn’t hardly speak, so one of her daughters explained that en route to our house a bird had been hit by the car in front of theirs, and they’d watched its body drop to the ground.

My friend, her daughters continued the story, had stopped the car in fright and sped over to where the bird had landed (no one mentioned dangerous parking or disrupting other traffic but these things crossed my mind). She’d knelt down beside it, lifted its still-warm, bloodied body in cupped hands and stared at it, probably (knowing my friend) whispering the sacred last rites and hoping her words caught its soul before it floated to bird heaven.

‘It’s a sign’, my friend said in a breathless panic. ‘The bird was black.’ She was pacing, patting her chest.

I’d wanted to laugh but knew from experience to humour her. ‘A sign of what?’

‘A sign that it wasn’t flying high enough to avoid getting hit by a car,’ one of her daughters suggested sardonically, which earnt a fierce glare from her mother.

‘You mustn’t say things like that,’ my friend said, pale, and shaken. ‘It’s a sign.’

 ‘A bird got hit by a car, mother,’ another daughter tried. ‘It wasn’t a sign.’

 ‘But the bird was black,’ my friend’s eyes flashed.

‘A blackbird then.’

‘No, bigger than that – a raven or a rook. Honestly, I’m telling you, it’s a sign.’

I’d taken a deep breath and sighed then, detaching myself from the reality that was unfolding before me–which is how I cope with overwhelm–and stared around at the piles of ‘His’ and ‘Hers’. Things that my husband and I were splitting for our imminent separation. The cat, a two-year old rescue and wary of visitors at the best of times, was pacing in confused loops round the various packages that smelt of her safe places but which were now boxed up and unreachable. God alone knew what must’ve been going through her feline mind. But concern over a dead bird, whatever its colour, would not have been part of her thought process.

It struck me then (as the car had doubtless struck the unfortunate bird) that my friend coming in here and launching breathlessly into this portent of doom tirade, was insensitive. Because, despite the room clearly screaming at her from all its occupied-by-cardboard-boxes, that her supposedly best friend (Me) had once again failed at another marriage; had spent the past few months trawling through the vestiges of said marriage and dismissing emotional attachments for the sake of maintaining shreds of dignity and sanity; who’d been systematically—alone at night because neighbours had stopped coming round not wishing to be seen to be taking sides and the puppy they’d bought in the hopes he might save their floundering marriage the year before had already been given to people who would love him and treat him like a member of their family and not as quick-fix Band-Aid—had been emptying the contents of the 1930s-style drinks cabinet down her throat and wondering if she had strength to go to bed let alone wake up the next morning…. my friend had thought that bringing the death of a bird—this portent of doom—into my already doomed world today was a good idea.

No, she hadn’t ‘thought’ at all.

I didn’t say any of this because why make an already bad situation worse? I busied myself trying to placate my friend who hadn’t read my room. This room which was screaming that her friend (again, Me) was not only hanging on by the shredded quick of her fingertips, and was so hollowed out that any form of kindness from anyone could’ve filled her spaces like a gasping lung and drowned her. No, my friend had been too blinded and blinkered to see anything other than a ‘message’ that some kindly, otherworldly deity had seen fit to send her in the form of roadkill.

I don’t remember the outcome to deciphering this ‘sign’ that my friend had been sent. I do know, though, that a lot more energy and care was expended over the comforting of my panicked friend who had witnessed this calamity and transformed it into a sign from somewhere. And once we’d brought her down from the flustered heights she’d flown to, we’d made inane small-talk about how we couldn’t believe my husband and I were splitting up after such wonderful beginnings, a magical wedding and where we’d all spent many happy evenings in this idyllic place in the countryside with views of fields from three sides.

And so I considered the white feather which had drifted softly across my path yesterday morning and which I now held in my hand.

I stroked the fine, fluffed strands and raised my eyes to see if I could see the bird it had dropped from, but the blue, cloudless sky was empty. I couldn’t remember if a white feather was meant to be suggestive of surrender or peace.

So I brought it into the kitchen intending to keep it to one side and show my daughter and her partner when they got home. And then I wondered what on earth I would say about this thing that I’d clearly th0ught could be a ‘sign’ of some kind or another. Only I still hadn’t decided if it was Peace or Surrender.

And when these thoughts reminded me of my friend’s black bird episode, I shook my head, on the verge of disappointment in myself.

I took the white feather back outside. I held it high above my head—the way it had been before I’d walked into its path and let go—to let it drift back to the place it would have settled had I not interrupted it.

Then I continued on to collect the oregano I’d originally come out for.