In the book “H is for Hawk,” c 2014, by Helen Macdonald, I learned a lot about hawks.

“H is for Hawk” is 283 pages, 30 chapters. Before I review her book, I’d like to introduce you to “Hawks: Amazing Animals,” c 2015, author Kate Riggs. “The Amazing Animals” series includes books about alligators, bats, beavers, and bison. These books are “Juvenile Literature.” I’m a juvenile, I guess, because I spent a lot of time with the beautiful photographs and reading about hawks. Page four tells us that “there are more than 50 kinds of hawks.” They can weigh as little as eight ounces or as much as five pounds.

We learn how the parent hawks take care of the eggs that have been laid. The newborn hatchlings will be born in three to four weeks.

Hawks can be seen by a road or a river, and we have often seen hawks on our country place or as we drive on the nearby county roads. Recently as I was driving to our place south of Cottonwood, I saw a hawk on a pole near the intersection of Highway 23 and County Road 9.

I checked out from the Marshall-Lyon County “Library Hawk Mission,” by Erica David, writer, and Warren McGee, artist. The cover describes the book as a “comic-book-style story.” The boy in the book, Diego, rides a hang glider to search for a lost baby hawk, and he finds it as he looks through his scopes. Diego talks to the hawk, and the hawk talks to him! Diego is able to take the baby hawk to his mother.

Then I found on our bookshelves “A Field Guide to Birds,” c 1934, text and illustrations by Roger Tory Peterson. One illustration shows Silhouettes of Three Common Types of Hawks: Accipiters (long tail, short rounded wings), Buteos (broad wings, broad rounded tail), and Falcons (long tail, long pointed wings).

Helen Macdonald, the author of “H is for Hawk,” lives in England, although she does travel to other countries — Scotland, and eastern U.S.A. She bought her hawk, Mabel, in Scotland. The word she uses a lot is goshawk. Mabel is an Accipiter.

Helen writes about her father in nearly each one of the 30 chapters in the book. We meet him in Chapter 1 Patience. She is 9 years old, outdoors in the evening with her father, who was “taking photographs for the paper” (p. 10). She wants to see hawks, and he tells her she needs to be patient. Then in the next paragraph she moves ahead in time, when “my mother called and told me my father was dead” (p. 11).

Chapter 2 Lost describes how Helen grieved. She doesn’t write about the funeral until a later chapter. In this chapter we do learn a lot about goshawks. She connects memories of her father with her focus in goshawks.

So now I’m asking, what did I focus on to live with memories of my father, who passed in 1987. I give thanks that I was with him when he died in a hospital room in Oklahoma. His picture was with my September 2018 Books & Beyond column about the book, “Bambi: A Life in the Woods.” He is on the floor playing with the rabbit in the kitchen of our house. As a young boy he grew up on a farm in Iowa, and I have a picture of him there with a cow, another picture of him out in a field on a tractor.

At her father’s memorial, Helen tells the story about him seeing the Air Force plane when he’s just 9 or 10 years old, and how “it is like seeing the Holy Grail” (p. 215). Holy Grail is something a person feels very deeply about in order to live his or her life with meaning. During our life, we are always seeking the Holy Grail.

My husband Howard passed Sept. 4, 2022. I’ve been with him each day at Fieldcrest in Cottonwood for about two weeks. I come home every day to get the mail from the mailbox and to feed our cats Pandora and Andy. See the picture of Howard with our cat Shadow on the hay bale we used to have in our backyard? The hay bale was from our neighbor Jonathan Olson.

Our daughter Susan, here with me now, can talk with me about our cats. She and her husband have cats in their house in Wisconsin. A 4-H photo display (Swan Lake Skippers) we made probably in the early 1980s shows Susan holding our cats: Persia, Sugar Sweet, White Paws and her children Hyena and Coco.

As my readers know, kindness and love from friends and family help us with sad times. When I sat by Howard in his bed at Fieldcrest and held his hand, I said over and over: “Peace, love, and joy are with us.”