TO CATCH A BIRD

        Sparrow, Sparrow,
        You’re so pretty
        Don’t you fly away.

The Barnes family’s closest neighbors, Hank and Beulah Painter, lived in a tiny unpainted house up a narrow one-car lane one half mile to the west. Every day Beulah and some of her children would go bouncing by on their way to town in their black Model-T Ford, top down in summer, making loud sputtering noises, followed by a cloud of slowly settling dust. Often she stopped by for a chat with Jenny’s Mother, Mae. Jenny liked this as Beulah, a large red haired woman, had a ready hearty laugh, liked to joke, and would usually have some colorful bit of news to tell them. Once, when Jenny was creeping carefully around under the big cedar trees in the front yard, Beulah stopped her car in the road for a minute.

“What do you think you’re doing, Jennifer Jane?”

“I’m tryin’ to catch a bird,” Jenny told her, pointing to a flock of sparrows, pecking away at the ground under the cedars.

“What you need is a little salt to put on its tail,” Beulah laughed, and drove on to town.

Jenny eagerly ran to the kitchen, where Mother was baking bread, saying breathlessly, “I need the salt shaker.”

“What for?”

“To catch a bird. If I put salt on its tail, I can catch one. Beulah said so.”

Mother laughed, “If you can get closed enough to put salt on a bird’s tail, I suppose you could catch one. But when they see you getting too close, they always fly away. The part about the salt is just an old joke.”

Jenny felt disappointed and a little foolish. She should have known better.