There is an electric line to be run under a blue spruce where a mama hummingbird has laid her eggs. The electric line is to trickle-charge an electric car which might satisfy some idealized version of saviorism and privilege as a friend has suggested: “you got that car cuz you love the Earth,” and I said, “naw if I loved the Earth, I would recycle a classic or not drive at all.”

Meanwhile, the tiny eggs have hatched and they point their pointy little faces skyward and make the sharpest of noises with the tiniest of lungs. And even at about five forty-five in the morning I can hear them from my bed with my daughter breathing slowly from the crook of my arm, and I ache with hope that their own mama is bringing them something—maybe some mashed mulberry like the purple stuff I see splattering the edges of their itty bitty carefully woven home. I sneak a peek and make sure their wiry feathered bodies are still panting forth their flurried little lives.

I check close, but not too close, for fear Mama might not come back for them. I don’t want to shuffle their low-hanging branch and it doesn’t escape me that she wouldn’t have put them there, right there next to the porch chair where I read or text or social media almost every day and where I hang my clothes to dry in the desert sun. She wouldn’t have put them there if she didn’t somehow trust me. And I know she knows me because once she brought her super-speed sharpness right up in between my eyes, and let me tell you—it was intimidating. Hummingbirds never seem so sharp until they are split seconds from an eyeball.

So I guess that electric line and the saving the planet will have to wait for some tiny birds.

The electrician who came by to see about the project told me he didn’t close in his porch because a mama hummingbird had chosen to build new life on top of his porch light. “It’ll have to wait until next year maybe. But they keep coming back, so maybe that porch will never get closed in,” and he laughed and told me to call him when the time came.

There’s something about not having to explain, or maybe defend, this feeling.