Swallows, Paper Airplanes, and a Third-Grader's Prayer

I saw swallows again at the end of March this year. They are my favorite migratory birds.
It reminds me of last year.
My grandchild, then in the third grade, brought home two swallow chicks, holding them carefully in their palms.
They said they had found them fallen at the entrance of the public hall on the way home. They must have fallen from a nest above.

Well, this was a dilemma. Can you keep wild swallows?
But I couldn't tell them to go put them back.
I asked a pet shop about what to feed them.
They told me there is an insect feed called mealworms.
I tried putting them into the chicks' mouths with tweezers.
They ate, they actually ate! Not just my grandchild, but even I was delighted, and we decided to try raising them for the time being. I remembered we had a birdcage from a parakeet we used to keep, so I put the two of them inside.
They would want food as soon as the sky began to turn white.
I fed them with tweezers, saying, 'Here you go, here you go.'
It was a scene that we both found fascinating.
However, one of the two seemed weak from the start and lost the competition for food against the other. Perhaps it couldn't be helped. Eventually, it stopped showing any sign of wanting to eat, and in the morning, it was cold.
My grandchild looked so heartbroken, and tears were streaming down their face.

I don't know how many days passed, but the remaining chick grew quite large and was healthy.
One day, I casually took the cage out to the balcony. Then, from out of nowhere, a swallow with a brownish neck landed on the fence near the cage. Just as I thought that, it flew off somewhere.
No, I was wrong; that swallow had something in its beak and returned immediately. It was holding a dragonfly.
It seemed to be trying to feed the chick inside the cage. Of course, it couldn't reach it from inside the cage. Yet, the swallow returned again and again, holding a dragonfly each time. Was it the parent bird? Had it found its child that had vanished from the nest?
From then on, it brought dragonflies every single day.

This was a problem. The baby swallow was not yet big enough to fly.
Even so, the parent swallow did not give up.

After some days had passed, while the parent swallow was visiting, I decided to take a chance and open the cage. The baby swallow came out. It flew, or so I thought, but it immediately lost speed and fell onto a nearby roof. We quickly set up a ladder against the roof and returned the baby swallow to the cage.
Five days later, I opened the cage again to try letting it fly.
A great success. The baby swallow soared high and flew in a circle. Then, the two of them, parent and child, flew away together.
I told my grandchild that the swallow flew just like a paper airplane.
Then, as if they had thought of something, my grandchild went back into the house and came out with something in their hand. A paper airplane. My grandchild threw the paper airplane they had made in the direction the swallows had gone.
'That one flew too, didn't it?' my grandchild said.
We were speechless. It must have been about the other one that had died.
I simply bowed to my grandchild. My grandchild looked at me with a puzzled expression.

In May, the carp streamers of my grandchild, now a fourth-grader, are fluttering in the wind. If I said I thought I saw a paper airplane beyond the carp, would it sound like a lie? But it's the truth.