Read an excerpt from Blue Sky Down:

Mellie says your heart is the size of your fist. Once, a robin hit her kitchen window so hard that we were sure it was dead. Wylie ran out, crawled under grampie’s roses and he found it. It was still but it was warm. He said he could feel its heart beating. He passed it to me so I could feel it’s heart too. The robin’s feet were curled like fists and its heart was such a tiny quiver in my hand. I’d never thought about how small a bird’s heart had to be. We put it in the box Mellie had brought out. She said after a big shock, you need to be in a dark and quiet place for a while.

Before Wylie was born, mum took care of a baby that was real sick. It was born with only three chambers in its heart. Mum said sometimes that happens. She said the first time that baby’s fingers gripped her pinky she thought how everything in that tiny heart took up less room in the world than her little finger and she cried.

When mum told that story I thought how a bird’s heart was even smaller. I thought how the heart of a hummingbird wouldn’t even have enough room for sadness in it.

Wylie wasn’t interested in the baby or its heart at all. He wanted to know why mum had cried.

Pa did was he always does. He told us a fact. He said Spring peepers have a three-chambered heart.

After a while, mum said that baby lived as long as a peeper.

I still think about that baby’s heart sometimes. I wonder what it had time to put in those three small rooms.

There’s times this past year when I’ve wished for the heart of a hummingbird.