22: Turtle doves

Advent day 22 has landed, after circling around The Gallery (thank you Tara at Sticky Fingers).

Joined at the lip. 

Birds, like fish, tend to be aggressive jerks when it comes to dating. You couldn't, for instance, bring a mallard drake home to meet your mum. But a handful—doves, robins swans, eagles—form couples.

I identify with swans. Mostly because they are grumpy. They are also territorial, belligerent, structurally incapable of being useful before noon, and mostly useless after that. They are defensive, nest-proud, and they shout at anyone who looks sideways at their kids. They eat all manner of murky pond gunk, and appear to communicate through a series of honking and farting noises. 

Muddling through the pond-scum of life together. 

But swans are also graceful, deliberate, unflappable. They are loyal unto exhaustion and they love unfailingly for life, only opening their wings wider to allow for ugly ducklings. Which is to say, swans also remind me so very much of my other half, Papa. 

A strand of three (or four) is not easily broken.