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Show 62 All the feeders were empty Leah realized. How was that? She had filled them yesterday. Then she saw the seed. In the melted snow and mud on the ground, millet and peanut husks and sunflower seeds were scattered. So it had been the early morning wind. It had been the wind that had fluted through and around all of Hunt's announcements about going to Rye. And Leah'd just been too hurt and furious. But the birds were looking. Leah loved them. And she'd fed them all the length of the entire winter, so that now they were looking in the places of her nourishing and feeding, searching again. In the garage, in three metal-lidded garbage cans, there were seeds. Leah scooped and mixed them into a blue plastic dish tub. It made her forget Hunt; it made her feel so much better to breathe in sweet, organic, fruity dust from the seeds. It put her in a season. It carried her to the month of June, to a constant sun and an uncovered earth and grasses growing. Now the wind picked up in the rafters of the three-sided port. But Leah filled her container, scooped in seeds. "Just a minute!" she called out, beyond herself, to the yard, "Just a minute!" And it seemed as if she could hear a kind of pleased and anxious chatter in the birds' reply. Crossing back to the house, she saw the yard had become a bleeding checkerboard of: sun and shadow, shadow and sun starkly, everywhere. "Just a minute," Leah promised again, though she made the pledge with less conviction. She mixed seed with melted suetfat, then that with peanut butter. The |