Though I could see no sign of injury, I knew it must be grievously hurt to sit so still as I gently cupped my hands around it to move it to a safer place in the yard. It made a listless effort to peck at my thumb, but it didn’t struggle at all when my fingers closed around its wings, and I didn’t know what to do. So much beauty is not meant to be held in human hands.
Those golden breast feathers fading upward to pale brown, and backward to gray, give the cedar waxwing a kind of borrowed glow, as though it were lit at all times by sunlight glancing off snow. Its pointed crest and dashing mask—a wraparound slash of black—sharpen its pale watercolors into a mien of fierceness. It’s a tiny bandit with flamboyant red wingtips and a brash streak of yellow across the end of its tail feathers. An operatic aria of a bird. A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation. It was a gift to hold that lovely, dying creature in my hands. It was wrong to feel its death as a gift.
I didn’t know it was dying. I knew but didn’t know. At least half of all birds who fly into windows will ultimately die of internal bleeding, even when they seem to recover and fly away, and this stunned cedar waxwing was in no shape to fly. Even so, my only thought in that moment was to set it high in a tree where our dog couldn’t kill it with a curious sniff.
In any crisis I always seem to find myself suspended between knowing and not knowing, between information and comprehension. When my middle son was a toddler, he hit his head and briefly stopped breathing. I had been trained in CPR, but knowing exactly how to position a small body for help, knowing exactly how gently to puff into a baby’s lungs, didn’t figure into a scene in which my own child was in danger. I snatched him up and cradled him while his lips turned gray and my husband called the ambulance. In a contest between knowledge and instinct, instinct wins every time.
I should have taken that injured bird someplace safe and warm to die. Instead I took it to a cypress tree a few feet away and set it on a limb deep in the greenery. Its feet worked spastically for purchase but finally caught hold. It was clinging to the branch when I left it to go back inside. By the time I returned fifteen minutes later, it had tumbled into the soft ground cover below. One wing was spread out like a taxidermist’s display, those waxy red tips stretched as far apart as fingers in a reaching hand. I didn’t need to pick it up to know it was dead. I knew it was dead, but I hadn’t known it was dying.
Why didn’t I know? My mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and I have seen up close what it looks like when a living thing is dying because its brain is bleeding and there’s nowhere for the pooled blood to go, no way to keep the blood from crowding out the living cells of thought, the living cells of self. “I love you,” I said as we waited for the results of my mother’s CT scan. “You’re my good mama,” I told her as her eyes closed. “Thank you,” she said. I was waiting for the doctor to come and tell me what to do, and I didn’t know that these would be her last words. I knew but didn’t know.
I wish I had taken that soft brown miracle of a bird into a dark, warm room to die. I wish I hadn’t noticed the way my mother’s hand was already cooling when she took her last breath.
You’ll Never Know How Much I Love You
NASHVILLE, 2018
I don’t know exactly where it came from—this phrase of pure treacle, worse than cliché. My father kept the car radio tuned to the big band station, the oldies channel of his middle age, so I could have heard the words in a song sung long before my time. Perhaps I heard it on the transistor radio I kept clutched to my ear the year I was ten or eleven, that age when language sticks, when poems and song lyrics and incantatory prayers merge with the rush of blood in the veins. Now, more than forty years later, the songs on my transistor radio are playing on the oldies channel of my own middle age. I will never learn the new doxology.
Possibly I read it in a terrible novel, or the cropped version of a terrible novel. In those days they came bound five or six to a volume from Reader’s Digest, blessedly pruned books by authors who felt no uneasiness about writing a sentence like “You will never know how much I love you.”
Did someone say it to me once? In the desperate madness of mismatched love, did a boy whisper those very words into my very ear, where they found a place to latch, lingering decades longer than a love that now seems hardly more than a dream?
No matter. Somehow it worked its way into the sinews of my thinking, into the folds of my always unfolding memory. I hear it in my sleep; it comes to me while I’m washing dishes or watering the garden, snakes around my ears and slithers into my hair, settling like an invisible crown, too tight, on my skull.
I was six when I lost my first love, a boy whose family stayed across the road and up the hill while my own family left town. You will never know how much I love you because I am too young for such words, because I am too young to be the vessel of longing and fury that I have become. Did I already know, even then? Was I already so tuned to loss that a single line of pure banality could lodge in the reptilian brain?
A woman I thought of as a friend once said to me, “Your central motivation is fear of loss.” It was not a description but an accusation. She meant I was a coward. She meant I was destined to go nowhere, accomplish nothing. It occurred to me to wonder if she had ever, even once, loved anyone enough to fear the possibility of loss, but that thought was as ugly as her own, and in any case she was not wrong.
What makes a little girl walk into her parents’ room in the middle of the night and lay her hand on each in turn, a touch too light to wake them, just to be sure they’re still breathing? My hand rises and falls with each breath they take. I turn to leave. They will never know I’ve been there. They will never know how much I love them.
Separation Anxiety
NASHVILLE, 2018
It is dusk in August, and the voices of robins fill the air, surrendering daylight with one last call-and-response song against the darkness. All spring I watched these birds building their nests and raising their nestlings, heard those sharp-eyed babies making their harsh, monosyllabic demands. All summer I watched the parents teaching their fledglings to flutter up from the ground and into the tree limbs, or at least the inner branches of a dense shrub, as quickly as they could. Now the young birds have grown past the one-note call of desperation, and the robins are all, young and old, singing the same song. At twilight it is a mournful sound—something less than heartbreaking, something more than melancholy.
Or maybe this edging sadness has nothing to do with robins. Summer is ending, and my younger sons—the only two still at home even part of the year—are heading back to college, and I can hardly bear to see them go. When my children were younger, the connection I felt to them was visceral. During those early days of carrying a child—whether in my body or in my arms—I came to feel like one-half of a symbiotic relationship. All these years later, motherhood still thrums within me like a pulse, and I catch myself swaying whenever I’m standing in a long line, soothing the ghost baby fussing in my arms. I look at my sons, all taller than six feet now, and sometimes I can’t quite believe I’m not still carrying them around on my hip, not still feeling their damp fingers tangled in my hair or clutching the back of my blouse. Sometimes at supper, when one of them brings a glass to his lips, I can still imagine a sippy cup gripped in his fingers.
I haven’t forgotten how exhausting it was to be the mother of young children or how often I was frustrated by the close rooms and constricted plans of those days, the way my boys were always in my arms or at my feet. I haven’t forgotten how repetitive those days were, how I often felt unable to draw a deep breath.
And yet I sometimes let myself imagine what a gift it would be to start all over again with this man, with these children, to go back to the beginning and feel less restless this time, less eager to hurry my babies along. Why did I spend so much time watching for the next milestone when the next milestone never meant the freedom I expected? There will be years and years to sleep, I know now, but only th
e briefest weeks in which to smell a baby’s neck as he nestles against my shoulder in the deepest night.
With my own nest emptying, metaphors of loss are everywhere. The limping old dog who was my sons’ perfect childhood companion is gone now, and I take my after-supper walk alone. I watch the sun dropping behind my neighbors’ houses, and I listen to the robins’ song. It’s too late in the day for most songbirds and too early for owls; the robins have the stage to themselves in this margin between light and dark. I listen with an edge of grief around my heart. Summer is going, and daylight is going, and now my children are on their way again as well.
Already they are packing the minivan we bought when the youngest was in second grade. The house that all summer has been loud with life will fall almost silent. My husband and I will drive them to their dorms on the other side of the state, take a few minutes to unload, and then turn around to head home again. I will lift a hand as we pull out, though I know they will already be turning away, turning toward their beckoning new life. It has been years since the last time they looked back after leaving a car. They long ago stopped waving goodbye.
Farewell
Again and again I have to teach myself the splendor of decay. The cerulean feathers drifting beneath the pine where the bluebird met the Cooper’s hawk for the last time. The muddle of spent spikes on the butterfly bush, winter-dried to the palest rustle. The blighted rose, its tangled canes gone black and monstrous in death, baring now the fine architecture of the cardinal’s nest it sheltered last summer. The gathered dust on the living room piano throwing off light like sparks in the waning day, and the cut lilies’ petals, released in one long sigh.
Recompense
It’s your birthday, which always seems to fall on the most splendid day of October. Even if it’s a workday, you must find some time to set aside your whirring machines and your contentions. Maybe there is a creek that all summer was still and dry and now is wet and tumbling with twigs and leaves and sweet-gum balls. Maybe there is a field gone golden with weeds, with finches perched in the seed crowns. Maybe there is an old train track that hosts no trains but lays out a whole parade route of purple thistles, or a dirt road where the close pines have set down a thick carpet for your hurting feet. Maybe there is a lake where a bald eagle sometimes fishes, where you might chance to see it dive, to hear its wings rise up to break its fall, to watch its yellow feet pull a sleek brown fish from the green water.
And while you are walking, keeping your eyes turned to the sky, maybe the earth will pull you back to the path, back to the toddler holding up her hands to the drifting leaves; and to the floating meadow of duckweed the color of new grass in springtime; and to the lone frog calling with no response from the marshy backwater; and to all the sunning turtles lined up on their black logs like rosary beads; and to the crows and the blue jays conducting a bitter dispute high in the treetops; and to the young woman with a prosthetic arm sitting on a bench and telling a story with wild gesticulations while her sweetheart gazes at her, smiling, never lifting his eyes from hers. And maybe you will see two vultures, as beautiful on the wing as any eagle, circling the sky, and all the while the leaves will be letting go of their branches and falling down on you like blessings.
Late Migration
Every monarch in North America is hatched on the leaf of a milkweed plant, and almost all of them spend winter on fir-covered mountains in central Mexico, in clumps so thick that tree branches can crash to the forest floor from their weight. One recent March, a storm brought such shattering winds and rain to their Mexican wintering grounds that millions of butterflies died before they could head north to breed. And the milkweed that the survivors were looking for—once ubiquitous on American roadsides and in vacant lots and at the stubbled edges of farms—is mostly gone now too, a casualty of the herbicides that go hand in glove with genetically modified crops.
Twenty years ago, there were at least a billion monarch butterflies in North America. Now there are only ninety-three million. Once upon a time, even a loss of that magnitude might have caused me only a flicker of concern, the kind of thing I trusted scientists to straighten out. But I am old enough now to have buried many of my loved ones, and loss is too often something I can do nothing about. So I lie awake in the dark and plot solutions to the problems of the pollinators—the collapse of the honeybee hives and the destruction of monarch habitats—in the age of Roundup.
When it was time to put my garden to bed one fall, I pulled out the okra and squash and tomatoes and planted a pollinator garden: coreopsis and coneflower and sage and lavender and bee balm and a host of other wildflowers. Once spring came, I threw in a handful of zinnia seeds to fill in when the perennials were bloomed out. The crowning glory of the garden that first year was a flat of native milkweed plants. I know this scruffy half-acre lot is no match for what ails the pollinators, especially not in suburbia, where lawn services dispense poisons from tanks the size of pickup trucks. Around here I think I might be the only one losing sleep over the bees and the butterflies.
Our feist mix, Betty, was always in intense pursuit of moles. In a spray of dirt like something from a Road Runner cartoon, she could dig up a mole run in a matter of minutes, leaving a system of open trenches crisscrossing the yard. Once the mole was dead or had taken refuge under the roadbed, I would rake the mounds of dirt smooth again, cover the turned soil with white clover, and water it down.
“Rye?” a neighbor asked, watching me scatter seeds.
“Clover,” I said.
She looked at me. “You’re planting clover?”
“For the honeybees,” I said.
“Last summer there was a big ball of bees up in the crepe myrtle next to my garbage cans,” she told me. “It took a whole can of Raid to kill them.”
Spring brought a nice crop of clover that year and the first blooms in the butterfly garden. The native bumblebees loved the new flowers, crawling into them with a fervor that explains how they got all mixed up in a metaphor for sex in the first place. But I never saw more than one honeybee, and the monarchs apparently never noticed the milkweed plants with their rangy stalks full of vibrant orange flowers. Oh, there were other butterflies: cabbage whites and clouded sulfurs and Gulf fritillaries with their deceptive orange wings. But the milkweed bloomed and faded without a single monarch arriving in the nursery I had built for them.
There will be another summer, I told myself.
That fall, with temperatures still unseasonably warm for Middle Tennessee, I watered the butterfly garden through a profound drought that lasted for more than two months. Only the zinnias were still blooming, and I debated with myself the right way to approach the weeks of unexpected flowers. Cut the spent blooms back and force the plants to keep making new flowers for any butterflies still on the wing? Or let the zinnias go to seed for goldfinches to harvest?
As with most quandaries, I came to an inadvertent compromise: cutting the dead blooms when I thought to, ignoring them when I didn’t. So the goldfinches had their zinnias, and the Gulf fritillaries had theirs, too.
And then, a miracle. Walking to the mailbox on a sunny November afternoon, I spied a flash of orange in the flower bed. I was a step or two on before I saw it: a monarch, riding a hot-pink zinnia nodding in the wind. I walked closer, and there on a yellow zinnia was another. And on the red one too—and on the orange, the white, the peach ones. Monarch after monarch after monarch was gathering nectar from the flowers. All that mild afternoon, my butterfly garden was a resting place for monarchs making a very late migration to Mexico.
Monarchs migrate as birds do, but it takes the monarch four generations, sometimes five, to complete the cycle each year: no single butterfly lives to make the full round-trip from Mexico to their northern breeding grounds and back. Entomologists don’t yet understand what makes successive generations follow the same route their ancestors took, and I can only hope that the descendants of these monarchs will find respite in my garden, too. Every year will always find me pl
anting zinnias, just in case.
After the Fall
This talk of making peace with it. Of feeling it and then finding a way through. Of closure. It’s all nonsense.
Here is what no one told me about grief: you inhabit it like a skin. Everywhere you go, you wear grief under your clothes. Everything you see, you see through it, like a film.
It is not a hidden hair shirt of suffering. It is only you, the thing you are, the cells that cling to each other in your shape, the muscles that are doing your work in the world. And like your other skin, your other eyes, your other muscles, it too will change in time. It will change so slowly you won’t even see it happening. No matter how you scrutinize it, no matter how you poke at it with a worried finger, you will not see it changing. Time claims you: your belly softens, your hair grays, the skin on the top of your hand goes loose as a grandmother’s, and the skin of your grief, too, will loosen, soften, forgive your sharp edges, drape your hard bones.
You are waking into a new shape. You are waking into an old self.
What I mean is, time offers your old self a new shape.
What I mean is, you are the old, ungrieving you, and you are also the new, ruined you.
You are both, and you will always be both.
Late Migrations Page 14