I originally posted this on 8 June 2021, on the 8th day of my 100 day embroidery project.
Again slow progress on this wee swallow today… I did a wee bit before breakfast and then some more while sitting with Mum at teatime. Today was the first time she really showed much interest in this since I started actually stitching. She clearly thinks it’s slightly mad. Which it is. I’m ok with that.
Your bonus pic today is one of Mum with her wee sister Astri. And some pigeons. If we’re lucky, Astri will tell us where this is.
We established that it was most probably Trafalgar Square in London. And those are London pigeons. In the last few years one of Mum’s pleasures was feeding the birds on her patio. She had a pair of cooing collared doves that came to visit her regularly, and also a pair of wood pigeons, which are infinitely more glamorous than your London pigeons. And back when we were small, we were adopted by a pigeon one summer. It was a homing pigeon that decided our home was better than wherever it was meant to be … I remember it perching on top of the budgie cage, and poo-ing onto the budgies, which amused me at the time. We named it Cuckoo Not Our Pigeon. And one day it wasn’t our pigeon any more, it flew off to wherever it called home.
Did I mention that one of Mum’s superpowers is catching birds?
One of my early memories is of her with a wee blackbird in her hand (look away now if you don’t want to read about its demise)…. I think it was hurt, possibly by the cat. Anyway, Mum turned her back to us, and with a quick scrick of its neck, the bird was dead. I was hugely impressed with this ability at the time.
But generally Mum didn’t kill birds she caught, or not in my lifetime (though one of the legends of her childhood was that she killed a sparrow with her bow and arrow, and cooked it over a fire).
She caught birds that came down the chimney and got stuck in the woodburner, birds that fluttered against the inside of the conservatory windows, birds that flew into rooms and couldn’t find a way out again….
Shewolfinthevalley 
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