Wouldnt Hurt A Fly: Freya Parker

“But here’s the thing,” she continues. “Hurting something is easy. Anyone can close their fist. The hard part—the rebellious part—is keeping it open.”

“My dad used to say I had soft hands for a hard world,” she recalls. “He wasn’t wrong about the world. He was just wrong about what it takes to meet it.” wouldnt hurt a fly freya parker

Outside her kitchen window, a half-dozen flies buzz lazily around a bowl of overripe bananas she leaves out for them. She doesn’t see pests. She sees neighbors. “But here’s the thing,” she continues

Freya Parker, a 34-year-old wildlife rehabilitator living on the outskirts of Portland, has spent her entire adult life proving that gentleness is not a weakness. It is a quiet, immovable force. If you were to take the idiom literally, she is its poster child: she has been known to spend twenty minutes coaxing a confused bumblebee out of a sunroom window rather than swatting it. She names the spiders in her shed (George, Helena, and Little Ted) and refuses to use glue traps for mice, preferring humane catch-and-release boxes she builds herself from recycled cardboard. The hard part—the rebellious part—is keeping it open

Yes, flies.