Every day I sit with my mother and watch the sea. There's a row of birds perched on an errant log—cormorant, cormorant, seagull, heron.

Crow.

            Cath, sometimes I drift off for ten minutes and I don't know where I've gone.
            "Does that bother you, Mum?"
            No, love, it doesn’t . . . are you my daughter, dear? 

We watch frantic wing-flitting at her bird feeder, chickadees, starlings, sparrows. A house finch, brown-striped.

            Cath, I think it’s a finch, it’s only, oh, a finch a finch a finch! Are they trying to tell you they aren’t in there? What are they trying to say, love?

            “To say . . .? I, I don’t know, Mum.”

            I think there’s something, they’re trying to get something across, aren’t they, love?