After Betty died, I stopped checking my yard for nests in springtime, but my eyes are tuned now to the signs of nesting—to the male blue jay feeding the female on the limb just past my deck, to the tufted titmouse plucking loose fur from my surviving dog’s haunches as he sleeps in the sun, to the chickadee gathering moss from the deepest shade at the back of the yard. And I can’t unsee the nests they build.
It’s wrongheaded to interfere in nature when something is neither unnatural nor likely to upset the natural order. I can’t help myself. A crow lands too close to the redbird nest, and I rush outside with my broom. A red wasp chases a brooding bluebird from the nest box, and I rub soap into the wood of the birdhouse roof. It’s humiliating, all the ways I’ve interfered.
In recent weeks I’ve watched a pair of Carolina chickadees building a nest in the bluebird box outside my office window. When a bluebird arrived and tried to evict them, I stood outside in the pouring rain and put up another nest box a few yards away. The bluebird gave it no notice, but he stopped pestering the chickadees, and all seemed well. Then a house wren showed up.
One year a wren killed a chickadee nestling on my watch, so when I heard the unmistakable trilling of a house wren calling for a mate, I looked reflexively toward the bluebird box where the chickadee was sitting on five speckled eggs. There was the brown wren, a feathered fusion of music and violence, perched right on the roof of the birdhouse and singing a song that could only be a territorial claim. The new nest box, empty and pristine, was ten paces away, but that one didn’t interest him. I got up from my desk, went outside, and walked straight toward him until he flew away.
Two days later the chickadee was gone, her nest empty, and I watched from the window as two male bluebirds fought over the box, leaping into the air and knocking each other to the ground. In the underbrush at the edge of the yard, the wren was still singing.
March
MONTGOMERY, 1985
I lived less than a hundred miles from Selma, Alabama, but I was three years old on the day in 1965 that came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Twenty years later I knew next to nothing still. I knew state troopers had clubbed six hundred peaceful African Americans as they knelt to pray for courage on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but I had never heard of Jimmie Lee Jackson, murdered for believing in the right to vote. I didn’t know that the idea for the march first took hold when someone said they should carry the body of Jimmie Lee Jackson to Montgomery and lay it on the capitol steps so George Wallace could see what preserving white supremacy actually looked like.
In 1985, knowing so very little, I walked in the commemorative march from Selma to Montgomery on the twentieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. I wish I could claim it as a longheld plan, but I hadn’t meant to march. I had driven south with two friends to join in the rally, to hear the speeches after the march was all over. But far outside town, just past Prattville and the sign warning travelers to GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU, the northbound lanes of I-65 had been closed to automobiles and our side turned into a two-lane thruway. Drivers in both directions were confused, or just curious, and traffic was hood-to-trunk, hardly moving. Clearly we were never going to make it into Montgomery for the rally, so we pulled over and parked. Just then the first group of marchers arrived on the other side of the road, heading into the city.
They were exuberant, singing and laughing, walking hand in hand or with their arms around each other’s necks. Some of them looked across the median blooming with crimson clover and saw us leaning against our car. We waved. They waved back.
Then a handful of them were beckoning, and without even pausing to look at one another, my friends and I were dodging between the slow-moving cars and heading across the median. Seeing us coming, the entire group sent up a cheer; several of them—those closest to the spot where we joined the line—hugged us, draping their arms across our shoulders and singing at the top of their lungs the words to a song I’d never heard before.
More than three decades later, I can still exactly recall the smile on one older woman’s face as she reached out to grab my sleeve and pull me into the throng of marchers. I can still smell the damp clover in the median. I can still feel my burning cheeks and my thumping heart. But no matter how joyful, how hopeful, I suddenly felt—no matter how desperately I wanted to—they were singing a song I didn’t recognize, and I couldn’t add my voice to theirs. I could not sing along.
Still
I pause to check the milkweed, and a caterpillar halts midbite, its face still lowered to the leaf.
I walk down my driveway at dusk, and the cottontail under the pine tree freezes, not a single twitch of ear or nose.
On the roadside, the doe stands immobile, as still as the trees that rise above her. My car passes; her soft nose doesn’t quiver. Her soft flanks don’t rise or fall. A current of air stirs only the hairs at the very tip of her tail.
I peek between the branches of the holly bush, and the redbird nestling looks straight at me, motionless, unblinking.
Every day the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world.
In the stir of too much motion:
Hold still.
Be quiet.
Listen.
Homesick
BIRMINGHAM, 1985
I left Philadelphia, but in between the determination and the act were many humiliations: endless weeping, an illness I couldn’t seem to shake, incompletes in all my courses. I actually went back to Philadelphia in January, determined to start all over again, but forty-eight hours later I bought a ticket on a train heading south. When I lurched into the club car near midnight, I was not surprised to find a guy in back playing hobo songs on a harmonica. I had become the tragic heroine in a Willie Nelson movie.
I could have looked for more congenial courses, shifted the focus of my study. Instead I spent the semester as a typist for Kelly Girl, as a substitute teacher at my old high school, as the lone night clerk at a Catholic bookstore. On the way home from work, whatever “work” happened to be that day, I would stop at the video store and rent Harold and Maude. I always checked the new-release shelf just in case anything more appealing had come in, but nothing ever did. Night after night it was Harold and Maude.
I pretended to everyone, including myself, that I would be going back to school; as soon as I felt better, I would complete the final papers I owed my first-semester professors and be ready to start again in the fall. My parents held their tongues. On the way to the kitchen late at night, my father would walk through the dark living room, pause a moment, and ask, “Whatcha watching, Sweet?”
“Harold and Maude.”
“Ah.”
Clearly I was going nowhere, least of all to Philadelphia.
In June, back at my old college for my brother’s graduation, I hid from the professors who had written my graduate school recommendations, the ones who had been so pleased to aid my escape. But walking through the experimental fields I’d stalked in despair only two years earlier, I ran into my former Latin teacher, the kind of old-school professor who teaches an overload unpaid—convening class at seven in the morning, before any other classes began, five mornings a week, for more than two years—because the university wouldn’t schedule a Latin literature course for only four students. I ended up sitting on his porch for an hour, lamenting the failure of self-knowledge that had led to my miserable fate.
“Don’t go back,” he said. “Go with Billy to South Carolina instead. Get your master’s in writing while he gets his in art. Write poems instead of papers.”
Sitting on that front porch in the heat of an Alabama summer, with grasshoppers buzzing in the ag fields just across the road and bluebirds swooping off the fence posts to snatch them up, I considered the alternate future he was laying before me: a life of poems. It was a lifeline to a life.
Revelation
The fog comes on little cat feet, as everyone knows, but the fog does not sit on silent haunches except in poems. In the world, the fog is busy.
It hides stalking cat and scratching sparrow alike. It blunts sharp branches, unbends crooked twigs, makes of every tree a gentler shape in a felted shade of green. Deep in the forest, it wakes the hidden webs into a landscape of dreams, laying jewels, one by one, along every tress and filament. The morning sun burns in the sky as it must, but the world belongs to the fog for now, and the fog is busy masking and unmasking, shrouding what we know and offering to our eyes what we have failed to see.
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
COLUMBIA, 1985
In South Carolina I found my way back to myself. All it took was an ant swarm on a glittering chain-link fence, thousands of new wings glinting like silver in the sun. An escaped hawk trailing its zoo leash, joyfully killing pigeons on the state capitol steps. The heart-tripping sight of a brown water snake coiled in a tree in the Congaree swamp. The sulfurous scent of a dogwood tree outside my window split in half by a lightning bolt. The whinny of a screech owl in the dark. The taste of fresh figs.
Two by Two
In springtime the chickadees bring bits of moss to the nest box; and the redbird feeds his mate, seed by seed; and the bluebird carefully inspects every nest site her suitor escorts her to, hoping one will meet her standards; and the red-tailed hawks circle the sky on opposite sides of the same arc; and the bachelor mockingbird sings all night long. He will keep on singing until someone accepts his song.
The Kiss
COLUMBIA, 1986
The bench was hard, curved and flat in all the wrong places. The grass was too damp to lie in, and the night swarmed with mosquitoes the likes of which can be found only in a river basin in South Carolina—large and insistent and more numerous even than the roaches. The slippery Skin So Soft I’d applied hours earlier in lieu of DEET was sticky by then and doing nothing to repel mosquitoes, despite my own best organic intentions. My favorite teaching skirt was getting ruined—hopelessly wrinkled, flecked with flaking green paint, and smeared with bird droppings. None of these things registered with me.
But they must have registered somehow, at some point, because decades later I recall them all perfectly—the feel of the bunched fabric of that long cotton skirt, the salty-sweet smell of Skin So Soft mingled with human blood from slapped mosquitoes, the wet grass licking at our ankles and pooling at our feet, the way the seat of the bench was too deep and cut off circulation to my knees. I was Edith Ann in the old Laugh-In skit, my legs sticking out, too short to touch the ground. I was also nothing like a child.
We were alone in the back of an unlighted pocket park, hardly more than a vacant lot with a rusty swing set in the middle, located somewhere between the attic apartment where I lived with my brother and the classroom where I was teaching undergraduates to write. It was already getting dark when a man in my graduate program—a friend who might be on the verge of becoming something more than a friend, although who can ever say for sure about a thing like that so early on, when the question first forms itself into a question?—had offered to walk me home.
We hadn’t walked far before suddenly neither of us was in any hurry to get me there. I don’t remember how we drifted from the sidewalk to the bench, or how we even knew the bench was there in the dark, or whether we wandered over to it while there was still light in the lengthening April day and simply stayed till the light ran out. I don’t remember where I set the tapestry bag my mother had made to carry all those ungraded papers back and forth on my long walk to class. I don’t remember taking off my shoes, or hitching up my skirt, or whether I was hungry, or how we started kissing. All I remember is the kiss that lasted for hours in the dark, a kiss that ended only when the darkness had gone from black to almost gray and was moving on toward dawn.
I Didn’t Choose
NASHVILLE, 1992
The night after my husband and I brought our first child home from the hospital, my mother and father cooked a celebratory meal. I looked around the festive table, happy to be home. I was grateful for the loving man I had married, for the loving parents who had raised me, for the new little person who had come into the world in the midst of all that love.
Hot tears welled up so suddenly my eyes blurred. One drop fell onto my plate and quivered in the candlelight: a miniature dome of inexplicable sadness.
My husband noticed first. “Honey!” he said. “What is it?”
“I don’t know.” The tears poured down.
Maybe it was hormones at first, but weeks passed and still I cried. I cried because it hurt to nurse. I cried because I had no instinct for baby talk and felt foolish trying. I cried because I missed myself. I would look at my puffy face in the mirror. What has happened to me?
What happened to me: depression, mastitis—raging infections over and over again—loneliness, a baby who needed to be held all the time, and it never crossed my mind that he was simply cold. It was January, and the world was full of microbes. The pediatrician told me not to take him out until his immune system was stronger, so I fed him, and I held him, and everything else fell away. We moved from bed to sofa and back again, day after day after day. I smelled of sour milk and vomit. My hair hung limp in my eyes because I was too tired to lift a hand and push it behind my ears.
At the baby’s eight-week checkup, the pediatrician looked at her clipboard. “Are you still nursing?”
My throat closed up. By the time she looked at me an instant later, tears were falling onto the baby’s head, one fat drop after another. She put the clipboard down. “Tell me about it,” she said.
I told her about the midnight trips to the emergency room, my breasts on fire, my teeth chattering from fever. I told her my baby was always, always hungry. I told her I did nothing all day but feed him. I had to bite a dry washrag to keep from crying out.
The doctor leaned forward and put her hand on my arm. “The best mother is a happy mother,” she said. “Give that baby a bottle.”
Overnight my baby stopped crying, surfeited for the first time in his hungry life. He would drop off to sleep, his whole body at ease, arms and legs as limp as a rag doll’s. He slept and slept. The days grew warmer and longer. I pushed his stroller to the park, and we watched the older children play. All day long he smiled at me with a look of love so rapturous I felt unworthy. No one had ever loved me that purely. As a girl, I was as wholly loved as any child on earth, and I was sure this baby loved me even more than that. And the love he felt for me was nothing at all to my love for him.
But I missed my teaching job. I missed having people to talk to. I missed spending my days considering the greatest literature produced in my language. My baby slept and slept, and I was restless. Finally I buckled his tiny self into the car with an absurd amount of gear and drove home to Birmingham.
“You loved your job, too,” I said to my mother, who had once been a home-demonstration agent with the county extension service. Before I was born, she had traveled the back roads of Lower Alabama carrying pattern books in her trunk, stopping at community houses and church fellowship halls to show the rural women gathered there what the latest fashions looked like, to teach them the latest sewing techniques. Later, she had chafed so much at the monotony of life with young children that her frustration was clear to me even as a child. “You talk about that job all the time. Why did you decide to stay home?”
“I didn’t decide,” she said instantly, with a bitterness I had never heard in her voice before. “I didn’t choose.” She had been forced to resign as soon as she was visibly pregnant with me. By law the mothers of children too young for school could not work for the state of Alabama.
I remembered, then, a time when my mother went to work in my father’s office, though she could neither type nor take dictation—and suddenly it made sense to me. My mother had chosen work, even work she was not qualified to do, over staying home with her children. I thought of how desperate I felt during my seemingly endless maternity leave. If staying home was this hard for me, with an end point in sight, supported by my very culture, how much harder must it have been fo
r her in 1961?
In another age, or in another place, my wildly creative mother might have been very different. She was a woman who designed and made her own clothes, who loved to jitterbug, whose laugh was so infectious even strangers turned, searching for the source of her joy. Perhaps she would have gone to art school, thrown ecstatic parties. Perhaps she would have been happier in even a small-town life, instead of retreating every afternoon into a darkened room, curtains closed against the heat. Perhaps she wouldn’t have needed her little girl to tiptoe in with a blue pill and a glass of water in the gloom.
In Bruegel’s Icarus, for Instance
GULF SHORES, 1993
It was our son’s first trip to the beach, and I had dressed him in a swimsuit for children who cannot swim: it reached from his throat to his knees, blocks of buoyant foam sewn into pockets circling his chest and belly—the soft toddler belly that swelled with each breath. “He looks like a suicide bomber,” my husband said. In those days we still joked about suicide bombers here, where such creatures seemed almost imaginary, dwelling on the other side of the world.
“I don’t want him to be afraid of the ocean,” I said.
“He’s not afraid,” my husband said. “You’re afraid.”
So I settled our boy on my hip and carried him straight into the water—ankle-deep, knee-deep, hip-deep, waist-deep. He kicked his fat feet and his squat toes. I turned to look at my husband, triumphant. He was already striding toward us from shore, his long legs pushing through the waves.
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