Wherever they have been, and wherever they are going, it’s the birds only passing through our region that excite the most interest from serious birders. I am not myself a serious birder, but I still feel a thrill when I notice a new face at the feeder, a stranger at the birdbath. I treasure these glimpses of the exotic, this sense of having traveled to distant lands, and hearing, however briefly, their strange, foreign songs. One evening I looked out, and there in the growing twilight was a male scarlet tanager taking a drink. I had never seen one in this yard before, and I have not seen one since. But I think often of that beautiful bird, of the few seconds I could stand at my window and watch him taking drink of water in the gloaming. To me he looked like a blood-red, hollow-boned embodiment of grace.
Prairie Lights
EASTERN COLORADO, 1980
Even in a land-yacht station wagon, we were piled in too tight: in the back seat, my high school boyfriend and his angry sister, with me between them so their skin never touched in the heat; their parents up front; the little brothers ricocheting around in the wayback with all the suitcases. When we were halfway across the endless Midwest, moving fifty-five miles an hour through towering forests of corn and sunflowers, the car’s anemic air-conditioning went out entirely and with it any cheer that could be produced by an I Spy game or a lunchroom carton of chocolate milk from the cooler on the front seat.
When we got to the tidy town on the plains of Colorado, all the aunts and uncles and cousins poured out of the grandmother’s house, a great constellation of kindness come to meet us and welcome the family home. Someone mentioned that the Perseids would be putting on a fine display the following night, and someone else offered to bring blankets to the clan’s usual spot on the prairie, and my boyfriend’s father explained that I, a child of the damp, congealed air of Alabama, had never seen a night full of stars like the one I would see that night in the high, thin air above the plains of Colorado.
Though it was August, we had to put on sweaters when they woke us deep in the night, and though we were all still so tired from two days of driving in the heat, my boyfriend and his sister didn’t quarrel, laughing instead to remember another childhood trip to see another meteor shower, and when we turned off the road onto the grass, the soil of the prairie was not at all flat and smooth but jarred us till our heads bumped the roof of the station wagon. Everything surprised me. I understood that I understood nothing at all.
And, oh, the stars were like the stars in a fairy tale, a profligate pouring of stars that reached across the sky from the edge of the world to the edge of the world to the edge of the world. Even before the first meteor winked at the corner of my eye, I tilted my head back and felt the whole planet spinning, and instantly I dropped to the ground and hunted for something to hold fast to before the prairie tilted and tossed me into the black void that holds this tiny blue world.
In silence the family lay together, quilts set edge to edge. Across the grass I could hear the mother still trying to coax one of the younger boys out of the car, telling him she would hold him tight, but he would not budge. “I’m too little,” he said. “It’s too big, and I’m too little.”
A Ring of Fire
In the winter of 1991, my brother read Annie Dillard’s ecstatic essay about watching a total eclipse, decided then and there to see it for himself, and looked up his next chance to see one in the continental United States. When that date turned out to be impossibly far in the future—not till 2017—he and my sister-in-law made plans to view another eclipse from a mountain in rural Mexico, the nearest possible place to see the shadow of the moon obscure the sun.
There is some disagreement now about what they actually saw. My sister-in-law remembers a wall of darkness hurtling toward her across the Mexican valley, just as Annie Dillard describes. My brother only remembers reading about it. Did they see the shadow of the moon traveling across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, or did they conflate the experience of reading about an eclipse with actually seeing one? Could it have happened so fast that an ill-timed blink meant my brother missed what my sister-in-law saw?
I wanted to see this exceedingly rare phenomenon too, but I didn’t want to see it in some distant, unfamiliar part of the world. I wanted to see it in my own country, in the company of blue jays. I wanted to see splintered light glinting on all the intricate webs that our own micrathena spiders had strung across narrow footpaths in the night. I wanted to see sun parings wink through the wild rose of Sharon flowers—an effect of the partial eclipse that turns a forest into a great pinhole camera, projecting images of the waning sun onto the ground and leaving moon-shaped holes in all the shadows.
In 2017, I had my chance. I arrived at a nearby field in a public park to find it already ringed by people speculating about exactly when each known effect would take place. When would the color of the sky deepen? When would the air begin to shimmer, as though lighted by some other planet’s sun? When would the birds fly into the trees to roost?
Then there was my own unvoiced question: When it’s all over, will I know what I saw? Will I be able to tell the difference between what I saw and what I had merely been primed to see?
I still don’t know. I know only that something ineffable, something beyond the reach of my own language, happened in the ordinary sky. The air turned blue and then silver. A dog barked. A bird whose song I don’t know began to sing and then abruptly fell silent. The air cooled, and suddenly Venus was gleaming in the midnight-blue pitch of the sky. The people under the trees at the edges of the meadow had moved into the darkness of the open field. By the time I looked down again, they had gathered a sheen that made them all look like angels.
And at the center of everything was a ring of fire in the sky, a thin sliver of flame that burned as brightly as the sun but was nothing like the sun. It was nothing like anything else I have ever seen, but I recognized it anyway because it was exactly like something I have heard. In Nashville, you can hear it wafting from the open door of any honky-tonk: a song about love, about desire. Like desire, it burned, burned, burned, and it made me feel puny and insignificant but also ablaze with life. The ancients believed an eclipse would bring the end of the world, but the end of the world did not come for me.
I didn’t wait for the sun to wax full again before heading home. I had to get out of there without talking to any of my fellow mortals, without hearing any of their earthly concerns. I had to leave while the air was still full silver. And all the way home, tiny crescents bespeckled the road, a path of fractured light that led me back to my own place in the world, right to my very door.
Once Again, the Brandenburgs
BIRMINGHAM, 1980
By the spring of our senior year, we knew our teacher was dying. In truth she had been dying for some time, since the winter we were juniors, but her faith was unshakable, and she had young children at home, and so she believed this cancer, like the one that had claimed her breasts when she was only a teenager, was just a blackberry winter—an out-of-season cold snap that will not last or cause permanent damage. We believed, too, because how could we not? We were children. Death had no hold on us.
Spring came to Alabama, but it did not come to our teacher, whose hair was gone by then, her voice barely more than a whisper. She had long since ceased to lead the class in any conventional way. On good days a family member would drive her to school and help her to our classroom, but most days were not good by then, and she would send someone from home to collect our work or give us another task. Assignments came through her wavering voice played back on a cassette tape—notes on what to look for in our reading, assignments for our presentations on Shakespearean tragedy or the Romantic poets or the novels of Thomas Hardy. I remember so much about those books and plays and poems, the kinds of details I remember from no other high school class. I still know great chunks of King Lear by heart.
Of all the memorable moments of that memorable year, the one that has held me through my own calamities is a story we read the spring we re
alized our teacher was dying. She came into class carrying a thin box of records and a sheaf of photocopied papers, and behind her came her stepfather, pushing a cart from the library that held a record player.
But here the recollection comes undone. Picturing that day now, I’m suddenly not sure about those papers I think I see stacked on top of the box of records in her arms. Maybe she didn’t hand out the story as copies; maybe it was bound instead in the textbook we had hardly opened all year. All these images are absolutely clear, but I know better than to trust them. I have turned them over so often the edges have become soft and worn, their contours wholly unreliable.
I know it was the story of a man during wartime who sat in the back of a boxcar and closed his eyes and removed himself from the massacre by playing Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos in his mind. And after we had read it, our teacher opened the top of the record player, carefully removed an LP from its sleeve, and placed it on the turntable. When she set the needle down, the sound of Brandenburg Concerto no. 1 filled that windowless, cinder-block room.
I could not believe that something so beautiful, so otherworldly, had been conceived by a human mind and brought to life by human hands. So many of the other details of that day have fallen away—surely there was a class discussion, though I don’t recall it—but that high, haunting violin in the second movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 1 in F Major is something I will remember till I die.
It has been decades since the English class that burned itself into me and the death of the teacher whom I will always love. As grief has piled on grief in that way of time, I think I’ve come to understand why a soldier would find solace in such timeless music, which I have heard since then in recordings and on the radio more times than I can count. But when I heard it live for the first time, when I sat and listened to an orchestra play all six Brandenburg concertos, all I could think of, in the midst of that unfathomable beauty, was a line from Lear: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?”
While I Slept
NASHVILLE, 1982
I was dreaming about babies in cages, and while I slept it began to snow. Piled deep, hushed and hushing, it rounded the rough edges of the world in a way I’d seen before only in picture books and movies. I came downstairs in the unfamiliar house to peer from the windows in the kitchen. In the stillness before dawn the room seemed full of light, though all I could see outside were shades of sepia and iron, ocher and ash. The gray was muffled, giving way to whiteness.
I was visiting a friend at his childhood home, a prewar infirmary on the grounds of an orphanage. The tour he’d given me only hours before already seemed like a dream summoned by the bewilderment of travel. But it was not a dream. Abandoned children still lived in the dormitory buildings just across the way. My friend’s father ran the orphanage, and the infirmary had been refitted for him and his family. Their bedrooms were in the old nurses’ quarters on ground level. The ancient clinics were below in the basement. The operating room—its instrument trays and enamel tables left behind, thick with dust—was on the second floor, where I was sleeping. Most forsaken of all was the dormered attic that once served as a nursery: metal cribs still lined the walls.
I stood at the window in the dim kitchen and watched the snow pour from the sky. I don’t know how long I stood there before something just outside the window began to take shape in the dawn light, something alive with movement and still somehow immobile. Finally a bird feeder untangled itself from the limb of a hackberry tree, and all around it cardinals were jostling for space. The snow was falling, and they were falling too, and rising again—a blur of movement within movement against the still backdrop of fallen snow and black branches, a scarlet tumult reeling from feeder to spilled seed and back, again and again and again. I stood in the window and watched. I watched until I knew I could keep them with me, until I believed I would dream that night of wings.
Seeing
I have poor vision, the result of an uncorrected lazy eye. In some babies born with amblyopia, the lazy eye wanders, but my eyes had no noticeable misalignment, so no one knew I was seeing with only one eye. The way to improve a lazy eye is to patch the dominant eye, but the window for correction is small. By the time I finally went to an ophthalmologist, I was nearly thirty years old—decades past the age when a patch would do any good.
Because the part of the brain that develops in conjunction with the eyes did not receive sufficient input during those early years, I still see mainly through one eye and always imperfectly, even with glasses. I was born into a strong family history of blindness—my grandmother went blind from glaucoma, my mother had macular degeneration, her brother suffered blood clots in both eyes—and I take no day with vision for granted. I am filled with gratitude for the sight I have.
And yet I can’t help but wish I could see better. I look forward every spring and fall to the songbird migration, but I have only rarely seen the tiny traveling wrens and warblers. Binoculars are of limited help when the brain doesn’t develop in a way that produces binocular vision—although if someone says to me, “Look!” and points in the right direction, binoculars can give me a good idea of what’s there. To see the smallest creatures truly, I rely on a camera with a zoom lens, and even then I have to upload the images to my computer and look at them on a larger screen to know for sure what I’ve photographed.
One of the nicest things about the lake where I like to walk is that there is nearly always someone on the trail saying, “Look!” Thanks to that natural human urge to share something wonderful, even with a stranger, I have learned this lake’s terrain over the years and know where to look for the well-disguised secrets I would miss on an unfamiliar path. I know that a barred owl frequently perches in a dead tree near a particular bridge. I know that a great blue heron often stands as still as a photograph on a submerged log in one cove. I know the rise where wild turkeys drag their wing feathers on the ground and blend in with the leaf litter, and I know the bank where beavers climb soundlessly out of the lake. One summer I knew where to look for a hidden hummingbird’s nest because of a stranger with better eyes than mine.
I also knew where to look for a piebald fawn who was born in these woods late one spring, but knowing where to look is not the same thing as seeing what you’re looking for. Walking around the lake with my niece that fall, I mentioned that I’d long been hoping to see the white fawn, and half a minute later she said, “Look! There it is!” And there the fawn surely was, coming through the trees, her mother and twin right beside her.
That fawn was a sight to behold, glowing among the shadows, picking her way through the white snakeroot grown nearly as tall as she was. At one spot, following her mother, she seemed to encounter an obstacle too large to step over and took a sudden leap into the air. For an instant her delicate hooves flashed in the late afternoon light. If I’d had a camera, and if I’d clicked the shutter at just that moment, she would have looked as though she were taking flight.
The trail was busy—the trail is always busy on weekend afternoons in pretty weather—and all around us people were saying to each other, “Look!” and stopping to watch the piebald fawn walking along the deer path. Parents were picking up their children and holding them high: “Look!”
Farther down the trail, my beautiful niece, whose eyes see twenty-twenty even without glasses, paused before a fallen tree covered with shelf fungi. She pointed to a ladybug nearly hidden in the folds. “When I was hiking in Colorado, I saw a whole bunch of ladybugs, so I checked Google to see if there’s a name for a group that gathers in one place,” she said. “It’s called a ‘loveliness.’”
In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of Her Mother’s Death
LOWER ALABAMA, 1982
Well, sometime after that, then, Mother broke her hip. After we got her out of the hospital, we thought we were going to bathe her, but she wouldn’t let us bathe her. There’s a place in the Bible that says the children should not look on their pare
nts uncovered, or something like that. I don’t remember the words, but she was a firm believer of that. She’d let Eola bathe her, though.
She continued walking with her walker, but was having terrible pain. She was real touchy on her hip. And so we went back to the doctor, and he made X-rays. And he said, “The pins have slipped.” Said, “They’re going into the flesh is the reason you’re having so much pain.” And said, “Now, I can take them out right here in the office and give you relief, but you won’t ever walk anymore.” But said, “We can go to surgery, and I can put in a ball.” And so she said that’s what she wanted to do.
The surgery went great, and it don’t seem like it was very many days before they began taking her to therapy. And she came in one time, and she was just smiling. And she says, “I took a few steps today.” And so we were all just so pleased.
But she didn’t want to eat, and I was trying to get her to eat. And I said, “Oh, Mother, don’t do like that!” when I was trying to feed her. And she looked at me, you know, so strange, and she said, “You don’t usually talk to me like that.” I was scolding her.
The next morning, I reckon it was, I was in the room with her, and I got up and walked over to Mother and put my hands on her arm, and it was just burning up. So about that time the doctor walked in, and I said, “Doctor, she is just burning up with fever.” He switched right around and went to the desk, and he called the other doctor, and they got me out of the room and they did a spinal tap, and she was all the time saying, “Mildred, don’t let them do this.” And you know I couldn’t do anything about it, and Mother never did talk anymore after that.
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