A dove died today and I realized I’d lost April.

It was flying through the air at full force, I think because something was chasing it. It hit the window with a loud bang and fell to the ground below with a much softer sound, feathers swirling all the way down. It left behind a perfect imprint of wings fully splayed as they smacked into the inch-thick glass above my kitchen sink.

So Dad picked up its body and threw it onto the roof for the hawk on the telephone wire to see. If a dove had to die, he said, it might as well provide for something else.

The hawk seemed young to me when it came some minutes later and carried the other bird away. I looked up and tried to see where spring had gone.

It’s hard for me to tell days from other days when the sky is like this, the color of a dead dove and completely still. I can’t remember how many weeks it’s been and today I wrote that it was May.

I looked at the calendar to see that it was the 19th and finally I realized we are in April. An entire month has gone by and to me it’s felt like one very long day.

I’m hoping for blue skies tomorrow.