The immortal things

The first time her hands touched mine, they were so delicate I could barely feel them.

Her tiny fingers curled around the edge of my hand as she searched my palm for something worth eating, and I remember feeling both elated and slightly terrified that she might mistake one of my fingers for a seed.

Before I ever held her, though, I watched her from the other side of our ground-level apartment window.

Right outside of it is a little sanctuary Nikolai and I created for whoever happens to wander through our corner of the world. Nikolai has a knack for making things more beautiful, and I wanted a tiny garden with a birdbath and plenty of seed where the wildlife around us could find food, water, and somewhere safe to rest.

We named our garden The Cracked Seed, and on any given day, there might be fifteen little birds fluttering around it, hopping through the grass and arguing over seed. We've watched blue jays swoop in, bumblebees disappear inside flowers, butterflies and moths float through, squirrels investigate the offerings, raccoons arrive under the cover of darkness, neighborhood kitties patrol the perimeter, and our beloved Turkletons often lumber through like they own the place.

And then there was the chipmunk.

At the edge of our garden sits a light blue fairy statue, and for reasons known only to her, this tiny chipmunk liked to climb all the way to the top and perch directly on the fairy's head, where she'd sit and survey the lawn in front of her.

Maybe she was watching for predators or checking for competition, but every time I saw her sitting there with her tiny paws balancing her body just so, I thought she looked like a queen surveying her kingdom from the most enchanting little throne.

After she'd visited us a few times, I decided to try something I'd learned from Johanna Bloom, my animal communication mentor. I quieted myself and asked our little friendchip what its name was, and the word Ambrosia floated up from somewhere beneath my conscious mind.

I didn't know whether this little creature was male or female yet, but the name felt right, so Ambrosia she became.

Later, I looked up its meaning and learned that in Greek mythology, ambrosia was the divine food or nectar of the gods, believed to bestow immortality. At the time, I simply thought it was a beautiful name.

Over the months that followed, Nikolai began cultivating a level of trust with Ambrosia that was extraordinary to witness, especially because she had been so timid when she first started visiting us. In those early days, we'd catch a flicker of movement through the grass or see a tiny face peeking out from somewhere safe, her little body ready to disappear the second something felt off.

Nikolai never rushed her though. He just kept showing up with food in his palm, a soft voice, and enough patience to let her decide when it was safe to come closer.

Eventually, Ambrosia began climbing onto the screen of our window when she arrived, almost as though she'd figured out how to ring the doorbell. When she heard Nikolai's voice, she'd pop out from wherever she was hiding and scamper toward him, climbing directly into his hand and settling her entire tiny body into his palm while she packed her cheeks with whatever he had brought her.

Peanuts were a favorite. 🥹

He'd stroke her gently with one finger while talking to her as if they were two old friends catching up after a long day.

“Hi, Ambrosia Bean! How are you, pretty lady?”

Something always happened to his voice when he said it. It would lift and soften, and whatever frustration he'd carried home from work or accumulated during an hour of bumper-to-bumper traffic seemed to dissolve the moment she appeared.

Sometimes she'd stuff her cheeks until they looked impossibly full and dart away toward her burrow to add another treasure to her winter stores. Other times we'd give her fruit and watch her hold it between those tiny hands and eat right there beside us.

Eventually, the animal who once disappeared at the slightest movement would lie completely relaxed in Nikolai's hand while he pet her. She never bit us or gave us any reason to fear her, and somehow, without us noticing exactly when it happened, Ambrosia stopped being a wild chipmunk who visited our garden and became someone we expected to see.

Then one day, something about her changed. Her energy felt more urgent and purposeful, and I started wondering if she might be nesting. Not long after that, we noticed her swollen belly, and several weeks later, we met her little pup.

If Ambrosia was our dignified queen, her child was absolute chaos. This tiny creature would tear through the yard with an almost comical amount of confidence, occasionally chasing after the Turkletons as though a chipmunk weighing a few ounces had any business challenging what must have looked, from its perspective, like prehistoric dinosaurs with razor-sharp beaks. 😅

Apparently nobody had informed the baby of the size difference.

We adored it, and suddenly The Cracked Seed wasn't only somewhere Ambrosia came to eat. It had become part of the tiny ecosystem in which she was raising her family.

On Friday morning, before heading out to see my mom, I looked outside and saw Nikolai holding Ambrosia. The morning light was falling across them in a way that made me stop because she looked almost illuminated in his hand.

I grabbed my phone and snapped a picture, and when I looked at it afterward, I immediately thought, "Oh, I need to frame this."

And then we went on with our day.

Saturday was beautiful. Nikolai and I refreshed the birdbath, poured more seed into the garden, and made a little pile specifically for Ambrosia with a few peanuts because we knew she'd be delighted. Then we went about having one of those wonderfully ordinary days that doesn't announce itself as anything important while you're living it.

Later that evening, Nikolai left to run a few errands.

When he came back carrying groceries, I could tell something was wrong before I understood what had happened because horror was written across his face.

In a part of the grass where we had never seen Ambrosia venture, he had found two tiny bodies with fatal puncture wounds. One was larger and one was smaller, and we believed we were looking at Ambrosia and her baby.

For a moment, my mind couldn't reconcile what I was hearing with the world I had lived in only hours earlier. There were still peanuts waiting for her, fresh water in the birdbath, and her little kingdom was exactly where we'd left it.

But she wasn't coming back.

Nikolai looked at me with glassy eyes and said, “I didn't realize how precious and fleeting that relationship was with her.”

And I lost it.

I cried so hard I could barely catch my breath as memories began arriving faster than I could hold them: Ambrosia sitting on the fairy's head, how she'd stretch her body to reach our birdbath as she'd sip up water, her cheeks stuffed obscenely full of food, the way she'd appear when she heard Nikolai's voice, and how his entire demeanor could change because one tiny creature had emerged from the grass.

“Hi, Ambrosia Bean!” 😭

It's strange, the routines we create around the beings we love, because at some point, without realizing it, her visits had become part of the architecture of our days. We expected her in the morning and looked for her every evening. We noticed when she hadn't stopped by yet. There was always the possibility that at any moment, a tiny face might appear at the window.

Now there's a silence where anticipation used to live.

The garden is still alive. Birds continue scattering seed across the ground, wings flutter around the birdbath, and the Turkletons will certainly keep stomping through like tiny, beloved dinosaurs because they roost nearby. And other creatures will find the food and water waiting for them, but I keep looking for her.

There's an Ambrosia-shaped absence in a place that is still overflowing with life, and I think that's what grief is teaching me right now.

We tend to imagine significance in proportion to size, measuring it by the length of a relationship, the number of years we had together, the magnitude of an event, or perhaps even how important other people would consider the loss.

Of course, time matters. The years we spend loving someone give us countless moments in which our lives can become intertwined. But the heart has its own way of measuring significance, and a few months can be enough for a tiny life to become woven deeply into ours.

Sometimes something weighing only a few ounces can occupy an enormous amount of space inside a human heart, and a creature can enter your life for only a season and still alter the emotional landscape of your home.

The sacred can reveal itself in the smallest of things: a peanut disappearing into teeny hands, a chipmunk climbing onto a window screen to announce her arrival, a grown man's voice rising several octaves because his little friend has come to see him, or a photograph taken on an ordinary Friday morning simply because something about the light made you stop.

And I think that's why that photograph hurts so much now. 💔

When I took it, I didn't know I was standing inside a moment I would soon ache to return to. I only knew it was beautiful, and I'm beginning to think that maybe knowing something is beautiful while you're inside of it is enough.

Because we can't live our lives constantly anticipating the last time. We won't know which morning is the final morning, which ordinary goodbye will become the goodbye, which photograph will become precious, or which tiny ritual will someday be the thing we'd give anything to experience one more time.

I wonder if our work isn't to know. Maybe it's purely to become available enough to our lives that when beauty asks us to notice it, we do.

Ambrosia made us notice.

She made us notice how much life existed outside our window. She taught Nikolai that patience could make a wild creature feel safe enough to rest in his hand, and she taught me that a sanctuary doesn't have to be enormous to matter. Most of all, she taught both of us that something very small can leave behind something immeasurable.

I've been thinking about her name differently now.

When the word Ambrosia first floated into my awareness months ago, I knew only that it belonged to her. I didn't know that one day I would be sitting here grieving the short life of the creature who carried a name associated with immortality.

Perhaps immortality is the imprint a life leaves upon another, becoming woven into who we are and carried forward through everything we touch.

There will be other birds at The Cracked Seed, as well as other squirrels and chipmunks. There will be creatures who drink from the water we leave out, carry our peanuts underground, and briefly allow their lives to intersect with ours.

But there will only ever be one tiny queen who sat on top of a fairy's head and surveyed her kingdom, one Ambrosia Bean who taught two humans to stop what they were doing and come outside, and one wild little heart that learned our hands were safe.

Maybe that's the strange promise hidden inside her name all along. Ambrosia came to us for only a season, but somehow, in that brief crossing of our lives, she wove herself into our hearts and became something we will carry with us through every season still to come.

And perhaps these are the immortal things: the pieces of ourselves we leave inside the hearts of those who loved us. 💗