Oh, How It HIts You....

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mZ3XwLy2UI

I can't get this song out of my head, but that's okay. It's where my heart is. 

Nugget is very present with me, even though he's gone. As I was going out my business, my head in the pantry, a tableau popped into my head;  I'm standing in the same place, and Nugget, fairly early on in his tenure, was on my shoulder, and he chirruped.

I turned my head, and there he was on my shoulder, stretched tall, peering meaningfully up at elder's container of cashews.

That was the first time I heard him utter anything other than cooee or cockatiel 'screm' (not that he did it that often, although the morning he left was the most I ever heard that from him).

Following this was another;  me picking Nugget up from the screened in porch floor of the family that found him, Nugget settling on my shoulder with a quiet chup and closing his eyes. 

The day I learned Nugget knew gratitude.

As much as I miss my little feathered dinosaur, I can touch these memories in my head without wincing, and I am grateful. Because they are good memories, and he made a lot of good ones in the scant two years he was with us. 

There were bird tracks in the snow the other morning, at both doors of my house.  At the back door was a riot of bird activity; many confused steps of a variety of passerines jockeying for whatever they could find to eat.

But at the front door, a lone pair of feet hopped across our landing and along the threshold. 

Not mine. But.....