Yesterday was a dreadful day, a dead robin day, a day of wakes and mourning and sorrow. It stormed quietly, no wind, just long sheets of rain mixed with hail mixed with the very last of the white cherry blossoms knocked from the branches, spent and brown around their edges. The petals on the wet ground had fallen with grace and now diminished, adhered to the black road and slick pavement in transparent decay.

Yesterday three light bulbs burned out in our home and we spent the evening quietly, walking softly, eggshells and uneasiness, something unsettled in the world. Our dinner with a friend was cancelled for a wake he had to attend, and a young local boy ran into the waiting arms of death in the disguise of a truck. It felt like earthquake weather, it felt like the mountain thunderstorms that cause wildfires. Yesterday felt like standing next to railroad tracks while a long laden train rolled and squeezed and clattered and roared past on anywhere tracks, time counted in the heavy steel wheels crushing and gliding, the ground vibrating and the train engine's whistle far gone in the distance.

Yesterday morning in the rain, with white tree flower petals plastered to the black wet street and chunks of icy hail dropping and bouncing, the white a high contrast against the slick pavement, there perched a spring robin on the side of the road. The bird's dapper grey overcoat was dark with rain water and the bright crimson breast caught my attention, as did the lilted tilt of the bird's head. It was looking at a small bundle of feathery fluff, grey and crimson, in the middle of the road.

It is a dead robin day. That is the thought I had, and it brought me a sense of impending dread.

I think somewhere I read that robins, like many other migratory birds, mate for life, or at least for multiple breeding seasons. Perhaps they would mate for life except that life often ends untimely.

People, like wolves, like swans, mate for life out of necessity for survival. Survival of the species depends on reproduction, and it is truly a great tragedy when a life ends only three hours past birth. A baby died yesterday morning.

Such an unforseen, unexpected, unhappy death shocks those who watched a healthy baby born only two weeks prematurely into the world. They all had the rush of hope in their hearts, small secret heart wishes, smiling hopes that all their dreams and desires for the future might become manifest. Parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles waited and expected to see the change of growth, and wanted to watch the child grow, and maybe even to see a piece of themselves in the child's face or mannerisms. Nine months of hoping, preparing, considering, wishing, and wanting. Three hours of life. Three short hours. They wished for the child to develop strength and intelligence and kindness and virtue and sensibility and learn about love. They wanted the whole world for this baby who was born and then died with its tie to the womb still attached. It is a pitiable, unhappy and sorrowful thing, this loss of life too soon, too soon.

The death came quiet and internal when the lungs and heart simply stopped their pulsating rhythm of life. The lungs are one of the last things to develop in an unborn baby. Two weeks does not seem like a long time, but it is the incubation time for a robin, the time between laying and hatching of those bright blue eggs. It is also the amount of time between robin chicks hatching and learning to fly from the nest, and it is the difference between healthy baby lungs that can breathe, and the end of a dream.

The robins fly over the mountains each year. There lies a small feathery body on the side of the road, and soon its mate will leave, but testament to the importance of even the simplest life has been given by the surviving bird's vigil. The loss is felt; the loss of the baby is felt. The setting of the sun was somber and the sky turned a bruised purple with red veins streaked on clouds. Yesterday was an ill-fated day.