HeartLines

Every spring, a pair of house finches return to our front porch to make a nest in the same hanging fern to lay eggs.
The female has a narrow little frame with speckled brown feathers that fade into a dusty rose-red at the shoulder of her wings and lead to a smooth pink beak—as if she were a tiny mango, a bruised mango with a browning, ripened bottom. Her dulled outfitting of feathers is vibrant against the sky-blue of the porch ceiling, where she perches to inspect her fern.
The male is much brighter, he perches on the sloping white handrail of the stairs leading up to the porch. He flaunts a pastel yellow jacket, fringed with washed-out lime green and matching tinges of his wife’s brown. They both have short, spindly chickadee legs, which have always seemed too thin and delicate to be real. Nevertheless, those dainty, wire-legs sprawl into three-pronged claws that they use to collect twigs and berries for the hatchlings in their nest.
The female’s eggs are as tiny as the last digit on my pinky finger, and pale blue-grey. My mother discovered them one early summer morning while she was taking the potted ferns down from their hooks on our cracking porch ceiling to water them. That was their first summer with us. She gasped quietly, as to not scare the house finch pair that she quickly discovered to be watching her intently from a perch on the pollen-grime gutter. She pulled me over to have a look.
The jelly-bean eggs sat quietly, piled in the nest made from thin, dark brown twigs, woven tightly into a bowl and nestled into the side of the plant. I pulled in a sharp breath of excitement and leaned over the frilly plant, careful not to touch it. As I admired the sweet little nest, my mother gently tilted her hefty, rippled-plastic watering can and poured directly into the dirt, making sure to steer clear of the nest but to feed the plant that was their home. I watched from the floor of the gritty, pollen-crusted porch as she lifted the fern pot back up to its hook and proceeded to water the remaining pots—pretending not to notice how the little bird-couple cheeped closer and closer to their plant so she wouldn’t scare them off.
Since that summer, a sort of unspoken pact has been formed with the finches. We’ll water their plant—the same one every year, the second most from the left—and leave their babies alone, and they return every year, providing the simple joys of watching them swing on our porchlights and chirp to one another, and provide the wonderment and excitement of waking up to a chorus of litter squeaks that signals the hatching of their chicks.