Susan Graham lives in Kennebunkport.

My mother was a third-grade elementary school teacher. In retirement, she told me that the worst part of aging was the loss of friends. One of her bridge partners went outside to hang laundry, suffered a medical event and died.

Our family was gifted by the example my mother set about how to live at any age by holding herself open to new people. People can make this choice. As I age, I have tried to do this.

Another gift my mother passed on was her love of birds. She taught us to listen when we heard bird sounds. We listened. She told us to look for birds in the trees or the fields. We looked. One of her retired teacher friends slowly drove into a ditch across from the golf course, distracted by a bird, her last trip behind the wheel. She survived, but never drove again.

My mother broke her hip while walking to the store. She caught her feet in a newspaper bundle binder that was still intact. She was looking up at a bird as she fell.

I dropped out of college in 1970, during the second semester of my junior year. After working several jobs, I enrolled in the Goddard College Independent Study Program. The school had a counter-cultural, nonconformist reputation that attracted me. An employer used to say that I had a correspondence school degree.

We called ourselves nontraditional students. Today this type of learning is normal. The graduation ceremony took place outside in June, in the garden of the former estate that made up the campus. Past tense because Goddard closed a few years ago. The threats to its survival were evident even in 1978. Upon graduation several of us applied to graduate schools to preserve our transcripts, anticipating a closure.

My graduation was very “Goddard.” There was no march, no pomp, no cap, no gown. There were six of us graduates and we stood around the perimeter of a shallow reflecting pool. Many members of my family attended.

Everyone was given a lovely 3-by 4-inch note card on heavy cream-color paper. There was an etching of a tiny bird on the outside and this poem inside: A bird sings a song, it isn’t very long, sings it, never gets it wrong. My mother had both pages of the card framed in the material that defined the 1970s, leaded glass.

Recently I was introduced to the Merlin bird app, a creation of the Cornell Ornithology Lab that turns your cellphone into a listening device and identifies bird sounds. Mother would have loved it.

Sleep interruption and the inability to return to sleep are common among older women. During the recent heat spell, sleep-deprived, I got up at 4 a.m. and stood before the open kitchen window waiting for water to boil and looked out into the darkness. And heard a sound. I activated Merlin and placed the phone on the window sill. Northern cardinal. A bird that thrilled my mother because cardinals were rare here in her lifetime. Today they winter over.

The poem’s message inside the card with the tiny bird has more meaning at my age. Life is short. Use your voice. Be yourself.

My mother framed the card to memorialize a life event nearly 50 years ago. I remember everything about her and I recall the event. I see the tiny bird in its leaded glass frame. I read the poem and think about what it means within the context of my life. I read it again without thinking about the meaning, as you may.

A bird sings a song, it isn’t very long, sings it, never gets it wrong.