A Robin in Lockdown
“An English robin differs greatly from the American one. He is much smaller and quite differently shaped. His body is daintily round and plump, his legs are delicately slender. He is a graceful little patrician with an astonishing allurement of bearing. His eye is large and dark and dewy; he wears a tight little red satin waistcoat on his full round breast and every tilt of his head, every flirt of his wing is instinct with dramatic significance.”
No one could describe the European robin better than the woman who gave the world the personable robin within the pages of The Secret Garden. I recently discovered this little booklet Burnett wrote in answer to a letter asking if the robin in her novel was real. The short answer was yes! And during the uncertain days of April 2020, I had a robin, too.
I was living with my family just outside Paris, France, and the rules of the first confinement were strict. I was concerned about catching this virus with the unknown effects, especially because I lived in close proximity (in a cottage in her garden) to a lady in her 90s. Thus, throughout the month of April, I truly confined myself to the garden. If you’d told me ahead of time I wouldn’t leave my home and garden for 50 days I couldn’t have imagined such a thing. But the reality was not so bad. Paris had an absolutely gorgeous spring in 2020, torture for those confined in Parisian apartments, but for me in my own secret garden, staying put focused my attention on the thousands of tiny changes that happened everyday. There were tulips and daffodils, cherry blossoms and primroses, wildflowers and climbing roses. There was also a robin.
It was a Sunday morning when outside my bathroom window I saw a flash of scarlet go by with a beak-full of dead leaves. I began watching: he picked up a leaf from the grass, flew to a perch on the railing, glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then flew up to the lamp before disappearing into the tangle of vines on the side of my neighbor’s house. I grabbed my camera. Robin-watch began.
One afternoon my son made a handy pile of garden detritus right outside the window so we could have a bird’s eye view of the action, if you’ll pardon the pun. It worked! Our robin happily chose from the pile to add to his nest. We watched he and his mate all through April and on into May. And eventually, I noticed some small brown robins take their first foray into the sky from their nest in the vines. I’ll never forget the joy watching the robins gave to our first lockdown experience.
“There was every joy on earth in the secret garden that morning, and in the midst of them came a delight more delightful than all, because it was more wonderful. Swiftly something flew across the wall and darted through the trees to a close-grown corner, a little flare of red-breasted bird with something hanging from its beak. Dickon stood quite still and put his hand on Mary almost as if they had suddenly found themselves laughing in a church.”