Orphaned Feathers. A Strange Collection Obsession of 60+ Years (or Healthy Hobby?)

Ever since I’ve known Margo, she’s collected feathers. We’ll be on a walk somewhere, and she’ll suddenly stop. I know there’s another feather somewhere at her feet, and it needs her to pick it up. Now!

Margo says she’s done that since she was a little girl. She treats every feather she finds like a lost child in need of rescue and love.

It doesn’t matter what kind of feather it is or which bird left it behind. Large, small, brightly coloured or completely ordinary, they all qualify for kindness. I’ve never known her to inspect one and decide it isn’t worth keeping, nurturing.

She can’t walk by and ignore the feather. She must fix its lonely life.

And she won’t let go of it once she’s got it. It has to travel with her between her fingers. There is a lot of touching going on. She grooms it, spins it, and uses it as a pointer when talking to me about things she spots in the trees, dunes, or out at sea. The two of them became good friends during our walk. And the feather must come home with us. She’ll carry it all the way back and find a special place to put it, and that’s where it’ll stay.

I’m usually expected to notice the feather too. Margo will hold it up and point out its colour, its shape or some tiny detail I wouldn’t have seen if I’d walked past it. By then, she had already decided it was special. My role is simply to agree.

If she finds one while doing the gardening, it goes into the crack of a log for safekeeping.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it has been forgotten. It has been noticed, attended to, loved. There is a difference. Margo knows it is there, even if I don’t understand her filing system.

If one lands in the pool, its tip gets jammed between two pool tiles.

That keeps it out of the water and gives it somewhere to dry. It also means I can be walking around the yard and suddenly discover feathers sticking out of unlikely places. They appear in the logs, beside pots and between tiles, as if small birds had been dismantled around the garden.

Whatever is closest becomes an instant home for Margo’s baby feathers, waiting for a time when it’ll grow up and be included in one of her future creative explosions.

Some people collect useful materials in labelled containers. Margo’s method is more immediate. First, the feather is rescued. Then it is placed somewhere safe. What eventually happens to it can be decided later.

Until then, handy cracks, splits, and holes will become home to Margo’s orphaned feathers. Yes, they have a new mother to look after them; now, she is in charge of their well-being.

There’s a warm blanket, milk and cookies waiting

Watching her do this reminds me that writers collect things too. We collect habits, gestures, expressions and the odd things people do when they think nobody is paying attention. We store them away without always knowing where they’ll be used.

A character might inherit the way someone turns a feather between her fingers while walking. Another might have an unusual collection hidden around a garden. Small observations can sit in a writer’s mind for years before finding their way into a fictional person and becoming part of that person’s life.

That doesn’t mean Margo will appear in one of my novels as a compulsive feather rescuer. It means that watching her has reminded me how much a simple habit can reveal about someone. Her feathers show patience, creativity and a tenderness towards things other people might overlook.

I’ll post the results here when there’s an artistic project in development.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)

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