“Not bad, huh?”

I turned, and there stood Grandma.

“This is our Hummingbird Grove. You caught them just in time for their migration,” she said. “A little late this year, if I’m honest with you. It’s a bit worrying. Well, the whole world is worrying. That’s why I tried to make a new life here for me and my family. Something separate from the world but that had all the greatness of the world in it too. The mysterious beauty of the earth. Like these hummingbirds. They were your mother’s favorite, you know?”

“I did know that. She told me about this once, the Hummingbird Grove.”

Grandma’s eye did a little twitch then, and I wondered if she’d start crying. But she shook it off, and all the light came back into her face.

“Come now, before breakfast gets cold,” she said. “We got a busy day ahead of us.”

I followed her back to the house and then into the kitchen. Murphy was sitting at the table, her plate heaped full of bacon and biscuits and scrambled eggs. She seemed annoyed.

“Hurry it up,” she said. “I’m starved.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I went exploring.”

“And?” she said.

I sighed.

“I’ll show you later.”

Grandma took her seat at the head of the table. She cleared her throat and reached her hands out to us, and I remembered that it was time to pray. Murphy and I each took one of her hands, and she gripped us tight in her calloused fingers and spoke with that same kind of breathless, confidant enthusiasm she’d had before.

“Oh Spirit,” she said, “we thank thee for thy abundance this morning. For an abundance of hummingbirds, for an abundance of joy and blessings running in our each and every vein, and for an abundance of light, both that which shines down from the sun over our heads and that which blossoms in our hearts, thy true and secret gifts. May we all prove worthy of it. Amen.”

“Amen,” said Murphy, extra loud.

“Now then, children,” said Grandma. “The blessing is spoken. Let’s eat.”

I was on my third helping of scrambled eggs with butter and cheese and hot sauce when Murphy asked the question that should have been on my mind all morning.

“So Grandma,” she said, mouth stuffed with biscuits, “when are we going to the cops?”

Grandma sighed and set her utensils back on her plate. I noticed she ate slow and deliberate, in tiny postage-stamp-sized bites, and she chewed each one for an eternity. She hadn’t hardly finished one serving of eggs yet.

“Manners, Murphy, darling,” she said. “There’s nothing so urgent to say that you can’t finish chewing first.”

Murphy rolled her eyes and gulped her food down.

“Sorry,” she said.

“That’s better,” said Grandma, folding her hands on the table. “Now what was it that you wanted to ask me?”

“I wanted to know when we were going to the cops,” said Murphy.

“Goodness, Murphy,” said Grandma, “it’s eleven in the morning.”