When I was a child my grandmother withered over the course of some months until finally she was the size of a bird. In the end she was all bones and glare. She was a hawk one day and a gull another and a heron the next depending on the light. You would go to visit her and expect to see a gull like last time but instead there would be a disgruntled osprey in the bed. I pointed this out to my mother but she did not answer. Mom went every day. She took a different child with her every day. She would just look at one of us in a certain way when it was time to go and you would get in the car, mewling. The birds in Grandmother’s bed made gentle mewling noises sometimes. Sometimes Grandmother cried without any sound. It is a loud silence when someone cries without any sound. She had lived with us for years. She was stern and forbidding and brooded in her perch like an eagle. Her spectacles flashed sometimes when she looked at you. Birds can see much farther than people can. She could see through walls and around corners. She knew what you were doing before you did it. We would enter her room in the nursing home and Mom would say something gently and a falcon would open her eyes on the pillow. I wondered if the nurses knew that Grandmother could change form as she liked. Perhaps she could no longer control the changes and all day long she went from bird to bird under the sheets. That would be a tumult of birds. The nurses must have known but they probably loved birds and didn’t say anything to anyone about it. Often Mom would say something gently and Grandmother would not open her eyes at all and Mom would just sit on the edge of the bed brooding and I would watch the bed for birds. Did she have a favorite bird to be? If you could be any bird would you be every bird or choose only one in which to live? Could you get stuck being a bird and forget that you were a person? Could the bird you wanted to be refuse you? Some questions you cannot ask anyone older. They will laugh or frown or give you advice. You have to just hold the question calmly in your hand and wait for the answers to come or not as they please. You cannot tell the birds what to do. The answer to a lot of questions is a bird. One time when Mom said something gently to Grandmother in the bed, an owl opened her eyes. Owls have piercing yellow eyes for which the words entrancing and alluring and riveting and commanding and terrifying were invented. Yellow is a dangerous color. Yellow means caution. Yellow means be careful and watch out and trouble ahead. Grandmother died very soon after that. You would not think a woman could wither into a heron but what do we know? Probably when Grandmother died the nurses picked up the heron gently and carefully and reverently in a towel and carried her outside, with prayers in their mouths, and they buried her under the sweet-gum trees. Birds love sweet-gum seeds. Probably whatever people thought Grandmother was is only a little of what she was. Surely we are made of more things than we know. We could be part goshawk, or languages no one knows anymore, or dreams a turtle had one winter under the ice. That could be. We went to Grandmother’s wake because that is what our people did, and we went to the funeral because that is what our people did, but we did not go to the burial, because that is not what our people did, and also probably no one wanted to see the lean thin coffin in which you would bury a blue heron. Years later when I was driving past the nursing home where Grandmother died I thought maybe I would stop and poke under the sweet-gum trees for heron bones, but then I drove on, because I like questions better than answers. Birds are how air answers questions. Birds are languages looking for speakers. Birds are dreams you can have only if you stay awake.