Page 110 of Let the Light Shine Through

She tucks the feather behind my ear with a curl, telling me to keep it. That maybe I’ll need it someday.

“How is love created?” I ask, brushing the feather with my fingertips.

“With a choice. You can create love for anything you choose.”

“Anything?”

“Anything, even birds.”

I love birds. Maybe not as much as my mom does, but I love watching them, too.

“You can also love anyone.”

“Anyone?” I ask, to make sure, and she smiles, saying, “Anyone. You can love anyone, Gia, as long as they earn it.”

I think about that as we start walking again.

“You can even create love for friends.” She looks over her shoulder, winking. “Like Rowdy.”

That makes me feel better because I do love Rowdy. We just started hanging out at each other’s houses, even though he’s not one of the boys the girls call cute, but I don’t care. I don’t see him as cute or not cute. I see him as the shy, new kid that never gets chosen for dodgeball in PE because he’s too busy pretending he’s racing one of his four-wheelers around the gym. Sometimes I pretend with him, so he doesn’t feel so alone. It’s actually pretty fun and makes me love him even more. I don’t want to hold his hand or kiss him, but I love him a lot.

When we stop to watch a Downy Woodpecker hop its way up the front of a rotting tree, my mom whispers, “The love parents create for their children is a pretty special one, too,” before pressing a kiss to my hair, staying a little longer for some reason. Maybe a leaf fell in it.

“What about the love you and Dad have?” I ask after the black and white bird with a little red spot on his head flies off.

She’s quiet while she listens to a series of chirps, then says, “That one can be a little trickier sometimes because you don’t always have a choice in who you love, only what you do with that love when it’s created.”

“Does that kind take a lot of work to create?”

“To create? No…but everything that’s worth having takes a lot of work, and it’s your choice if you put in the effort or not.”

This is getting kind of confusing.

“But that love, along with all the others, they only happen when you conquer the most important love of all first—the love you create for yourself. None of those matter if you don’t have that one down pat.”

I frown. “How do you do that?”

“With another choice.”

There’s so many choices. How do we know if we’re choosing right?

“What makes you happy, Gia?”

I picture all our outings together, bird-watching, finding fun stuff to do. I picture the four-wheelers at Rowdy’s house. He lets me ride one when I go over there, and I always like how dirt sprays out behind me when I go fast. I picture the movie I saw last summer during the drive-in’s throwback night, too. It was about the skateboarders in California that made the sport popular. There were girls that skated too and they were so confident, the way they kept up with the boys.

“Those things you’re thinking about right now, choose to do them. Even if they’re big, scary things. Even if nobody else likes them, do them. Every single one of them. Would we have as much fun looking for birds if they all looked the same with the same voices and mannerisms?”

I shake my head, my hand coming up to grab the feather so it doesn’t fall out.

“No, we wouldn’t. It’d be boring, and eventually we’d stop looking for the beauty in the world because there wouldn’t be any worth appreciating. Diversity makes the world beautiful, but it can only exist if you find what makes you happy, what makes you different, and run with it. Never back down from what makes you happy and never apologize for being yourself. You’re the only person that gets to live in your skin and in your head and in your heart, so make sure it’s somewhere you want to be all the time. That’s how you love yourself.”

“You know all that from a feather?” I ask, and she laughs again.

“The choices we make determine which path we take in life, but birds have a different vantage point than us, so they can show us things we might not be able to see on our own. Free will dictates what ultimately happens, but birds give us signs along the way, including warnings. We must always keep an eye out though, because some are even messages from our loved ones that can’t be with us anymore.”

“Like Nonna?”

I never got to meet my grandma, but my mom talks about her a lot.