History in a Bird's Nest

My father has the amazing ability to “whittle” recognizable shapes out of virtually any straggly bush and one day decided that the out-of-control forsythia in my front yard was actually a basket. Soon after, he arrived with a piece of rebar and his hedge clippers and set to work. A couple of years later, it became an Easter Basket. The year after that, as I was getting the front garden ready to plant, I found this bird’s nest on the ground. The green strands are some of the synthetic grass we used to line the Easter basket; the black is some of the deer netting we had used to protect our vulnerable plantings the previous winter. We’ve preserved this nest for twelve years now, although I managed to over-prune the basket out of existence.