I was ever hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps. After too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. And I was good with them in that I could make funny faces at the babies and with the older children teach them card tricks and speak in the theatrically sarcastic tones that disarmed and enthralled them. I'd finished my exams and was answering ads from the student job board, ones for "childcare provider." I liked children - I did! - or rather, I liked them OK. I was looking in December for work that would begin at the start of the January term. Or rather, that is an expression - of politeness, a false promise of delicacy - for in fact I wondered about them all the time: imagining them dead, in stunning heaps, in some killing cornfield outside of town, or dropped from the sky in twos and threes, for miles down along the Illinois state line.
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I did not want to think about what had happened to them. I was a student and needed babysitting work, and so I would walk from interview to interview in these attractive but wintry neighborhoods, the eerie multitudes of robins pecking at the frozen ground, dun-gray and stricken - though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken - until at last, late in my search, at the end of a week, startlingly, the birds had disappeared. By the time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south, they were huddled in people's yards, their feathers puffed for some modicum of warmth. The cold came late that fall and the songbirds were caught off guard.