The robins — who had been joined by a few loud wrens — were still meeting weekly to rehearse their holiday carols.

Today, they had agreed to meet in the honeysuckle bushes by the garden fence, where they could snack on berries after rehearsal. If they timed it correctly, the honeysuckle also provided a good vantage point for watching the squirrel and chipmunk children use their borrowed garden tools to rake leaves out of the meadow, in preparation for the community feast in a few days’ time.

The children’s (and the birds’) favorite part of this yearly task was when they’d finished and could set their rakes aside, whoop and holler, and dive into the giant piles they’d created, reveling in the sound of crunching leaves and laughing birds.

(Late November 2023)

Story © Jennifer Singleton / Read+Purr

This is another vignette in my ongoing series of Tiny Garden Stories: peaceful 1-minute tales that let you read like a kid again. Click one of the first two buttons below to go to (or back to, if that’s where you fell down the rabbit hole) either the “Public Garden” archive page or (if you’re a Story Club member) to the members-only “Private Garden” page. Or click the third button to learn more about my Tiny Garden Stories. If you’re new to Tiny Garden Story-land and would like 10 days’ worth of stories from our first year, visit ReadPurrNewsletter.com.