There she is, perched on my finger, as I hold her up to the morning sun. Yellow she is, from her cockscomb to her long tail, with poppy orange cheeks.

The painter Paul Gauguin would have loved her. Her name is Ms. Kramer, and she is about 20 years old, and that’s a guess.

Where once she owned the house, she no longer flies, so she lives now in a beautiful cage for protection, much as we do.

She hates the cage. I hate it too. But we both accept it. She’s elderly, loved and safe.

“Cage” is a hard, frightening word. Can there be any two words in the English language, or any language, more incongruous than bird and cage?

Did the Great Spirit you believe in create birds to be caged? Trees, fences, gentle fingers and pillows of wind, but never cages.

I remembered this morning a New Year’s Eve long ago, when my date and I left the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. We were met with the sight of a poor, old, homeless woman begging nearby. She stood there in freezing cold air, wearing nothing even slightly resembling a coat.

Mike, the big Irish doorman, stepped over to her, took off his huge, green, wool brass-buttoned overcoat, put it around her shoulders and walked her into the lobby.

My date, a freshly minted Mount Holyoke graduate, touched my arm.

“Have you ever seen anything so incongruous in your life?” she asked.

I agreed, but I had to look the word up at home before I could sleep.

Incongruous, “Not in harmony,” it said. “Strange, odd, absurd, bizarre.”

My passion for birds began with “Charlie,” a green Amazon parrot that dropped out of a tree to my shoulder on a street near my home.

I later learned that weeks earlier, there had been a major fire in the San Fernando Valley, and the owners had been forced to free their stock of exotic birds.

Charlie was a survivor, and he stayed on a pedestal in our den for almost a year, and then one day — bored with civility — flew away.

Ms. Kramer, a pet store girl, first sat on a perch in my kitchen uncaged for months, until Jack The Dog came along, and that gave me pause. So I bought her a cage, but she hated it and flew back to her perch.

One day, she dropped onto Jack’s back, and he didn’t object. They bonded, a cockatiel and an Old English Sheepdog. Incongruous? Indeed.

This morning I panned the stunned pale faces of the great displaced Ukrainians at the railroad stations, waiting for the train doors to open.

With piles of luggage at their feet, they stood in the freezing cold, holding their children and cats and dogs, but not a bird in a cage in sight.

There must be birds, I thought. There must be people among these who owned even a small parakeet. Where were the birds? Maybe these humans simply freed them.

Better to die in a burned-out tree, they thought, than in a cage.

The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
— Maya Angelou

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer. 

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