by Christopher Blackwell
Last month, a small, vibrant barn swallow and her partner started building a nest outside a window at the jail where I am jailed. The vibrantly colored birds worked vigilantly, assembling their nest one beakful of mud at a time. All the men in my system were right away mesmerized by the peek of nature we so hardly ever get to experience.
In jail, men act hard and move thoroughly within an extremely segregated environment. But when those birds planted themselves outside our window, those barriers disappeared. The dayroom was loaded, with men from various gangs and races squeezing in together to observe the swallows at work. We viewed their every relocation, pointing, chuckling, and shouting like we were friends. In those minutes, we might let our guards down, ignore jail politics, and simply be ourselves. I see minutes like these due to the fact that they are so uncommon.
After finishing her nest, the mom bird laid 4 fingernail-sized eggs. The eggs hatched, and the child birds rapidly ended up being the talk of the system. Suddenly, every person in jail was an ornithologist, declaring to understand whether barn swallows were a threatened types, what sort of food they consumed, for how long the chicks would require to grow, and a string of other information that appeared a minimum of rather credible. I have no concept if any of them understood what they were speaking about, however it felt good to see everybody delighted about something besides common jail crap, like raising weights and card video games. Even the most difficult men ended up being taken in by these little animals. It was difficult not to be—they were charming.
The child birds ended up being a cherished part of my everyday regimen—each early morning at 5 a.m. I would make my very first cup of freeze-dried coffee and examine the nest. I approached gradually, cautious not to disturb the mom bird. As you can envision, she wasn’t precisely delighted about us towering above her brood. But throughout these calm, peaceful early mornings, she in some cases permitted me to get close.
I would count each of the 4 children, making certain they had all endured another night. I enjoyed the silence, the time to believe. After living in jail for twenty years surrounded by layers of thick razor wire fencing developed to keep us in and whatever else out, having this personal connection to nature felt unique. For a couple of minutes, I might seem like a part of something much larger than the closed world of this penitentiary.
As the chicks grew, we stressed about whether they would all make it through. One detainee was encouraged it was just a matter of time up until the birds pressed among the children out of the nest to make more room. I questioned if that held true. I swore that if it occurred, I would raise the child myself, providing it a home in my cell. How would it learn to fly? That was an issue for later on.
We didn’t constantly settle on what was finest for the birds. One time, among the men climbed up on the window ledge and tapped on the glass—as if he were a kid peering into an aquarium—hoping the children would raise their heads. This triggered turmoil. Several detainees, myself consisted of, got developed and implicated him of disrupting the birds for his own self-centered home entertainment. He attempted to insist he wasn’t troubling them, however the mom bird’s anxious chirps said otherwise. Finally, he left them alone, however he was too prideful to confess he was incorrect.
On the early morning of July 4, a detainee on my system called Dakota Collins quipped the birds were bound to discover their self-reliance that day. “It’s destined,” Collins said.
What had actually begun as a joke ended up being a prediction. By midday, all 4 children had actually left the nest.
“It’s cool that these birds are finding their independence on Independence Day,” Thomas Mullin-Coston, another detainee in my system, informed me. “It just makes the day—we get a good meal today and our friends are off to start their little lives.”
Although the men were likewise sad to see the birds go, we would be the last to resent any living being its flexibility.
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