Grace of the Sandhills, by Nancy Glass

Sandhill Cranes Landing, photography by Nancy Glass (USA) 2017

​Grace of the Sandhills
 
I often think of that cold weekend in Nebraska on the cusp of spring: the clouds low in the threatening gray sky, the flat, flat landscape from Omaha to Kearney, the fields of grain reduced to brown stubble.  And the wind, thrusting through my coat and hat, reaching for my throat.
 
I could say that watching the sandhill cranes land on the Platte River at dusk was one of the most grace-filled moments of my life.  That weekend, there were an estimated six hundred thousand sandhill cranes roosting on the river, circling in clusters above our heads, landing awkwardly on sandbars in the river with legs splayed wide like landing gear as the violet darkness deepened.  The scuffles, the honking, the flapping of wings and legs as each one jockeyed for an optimal position on the narrow sandbars, safe from predators.   The experience may have been grace-filled but the cranes were hardly graceful on land, with behaviors straight out of a cartoon movie I somehow missed.
 
For thousands of years, these birds have funneled onto the Platte from points along the Gulf Coast and the Southwestern states to rest and fuel themselves for the journey north to Canada and Alaska.  Even with their habitat in peril, they are as oblivious to us now as they were all those many centuries ago.  South of the equator, the indigenous people of Australia believed that the Magellanic Clouds, two small irregular galaxies on the edge of our Milky Way, represented two cranes who flew up into the sky to escape the emu spirit, tethered to the ground.  The cranes, always looking for safety.
 
I believe that the cranes’ ascension off the river in the fire of sunrise, a group here, a group there, rising now in their natural form as ballerinas, represents the grace with which we awaken each day, to strive once more.

Nancy Glass

Dr. Nancy Glass has been published in the Missouri Review, The Intima, in Pulse, in Examined Life, in Persimmon Tree, and others.  She won the 2022 Writer’s League of Texas Manuscript Contest in Nonfiction and was runner-up for the Perkoff Prize at the Missouri Review in 2024.  She practiced pediatric anesthesia and hospice medicine, retiring as Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in 2022.  She received her MFA (Writing) from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2023. She is completing a book of pediatric hospice essays and violates the privacy of birds all over the world.