This is a real story about two little birds once lived at my parent’s home.

My cousin got a pair of birds from her friends, but later she didn’t want to take the trouble to take care of them, she then took the birds to my parents because she thought my little niece would love to have the birds.

I knew about this from my mother on telephone. They were two young snow-white birds.

I didn’t see the birds until two years later when I went back home for a long vacation. They lived in a birdcage, in the shape of a little house. It was their home. At the beginning, I didn’t pay much attention to the birds, I spent most of my time playing with my little niece. -- Birds like gold fishes were not my favourite, because they could not be held and touched, and, I thought they didn’t have emotions. I like dogs and cats much more.

But the two little birds had later changed my attitude and made me start to like birds.

It was summer, the sun came early in morning, when there was enough sunshine in the sitting room where the birds were, they started to sing, or maybe just talk to each other. Their singing often awakened me, and I found it was so nice to wake up in birds singing, in fresh summer morning. They were not the kind of birds famous for singing, but their singing sounds wonderful, from which I could tell they were very happy.

Probably for the first time I realized that birds could also communicate their emotions. This should always be true, I just never really thought about it before.

I started to become interested in the little birds and soon I found something even more interesting about them. – From time to time, my parents let the birds came out of their cage to enjoy a bigger space. Obviously they liked it, when the small cage door was opened, they immediately jumped out, but they didn’t fly all around the sitting room, and they didn’t try to explore other rooms either, they went directly to the flowers in the sitting room. The plants were the thing the most attractive to them. They especially liked to play in the pot of a cactus, because the pot was very big. They jumped around, and up and down, and they talked to each other if they found some dry tea leaf or anything nice to them, then they picked it and took back to their home.

They were two “family birds”. Probably all birds are family-loving, because building nestle is in their nature. But when you really saw it, you couldn’t help thinking how lovely they were.

After some time, when they thought they had enough fun, they went back to their cage. You never had to try to catch and put them back into the cage, they just went back on themselves, like kids come back home from playground.

To the little birds, the cage was their home, they never doubted about it.

But it still surprised me when I heard that the little birds didn’t fly away even when they were put in open courtyard. My parents’ house has a courtyard in which there are a couple of apple trees and also vegetables in summer. My parents sometimes put the birds in the courtyard so that they can enjoy playing around the trees and vegetables, rather than only the flowers in the sitting room. And they never flew away, when they had enough fun, they still jumped back to their cage like they always did. For them, the cage was not something to escape from, but somewhere to stay in. Because they were probably born in a cage, and had lived in the cage since they were very small.

I felt a bit sad because they were birds with wings, and they never really flew. But they were happy, they enjoyed staying in the house-shaped cage, they enjoyed singing in the morning sunshine, they enjoyed their play time in the cactus pot, and occasional big vacation in the courtyard. Everything was fine to them, they were two happy little birds, indeed.

I thought they would always be happy little birds, staying at their home.

After the vacation, I left home and went back to work about one thousand kilometers away from my hometown. I kept in touch with my parents by telephone. But at that time, I didn’t call back home so often and never asked about the birds. I gradually forgot about them.

Until about one year later, my mother told me on phone one of the birds died and the other one flew away, after being restless for a few days. I was very surprised, and I couldn’t help thinking about the bird after hung up the phone. -- She was a little bird never left the cage, her home; and she never flew farther than the courtyard, but she eventually flew away, because she lost her companion. -- The cage was her home, but the other bird was her whole world. They lived together all their life, when one of them was gone, home was no longer the same home anymore. So she went searching desperately her companion, the only companion she ever had.

She was just a little bird, but she had emotions.