lovely, lost, plunging through space, unguided, blind.
My mind, I want to say, is like a cage full of dead birds.
The time when I was six and somebody spotted a bear in the river swamp, the first bear sighted there in thirty years. Businesses closed all over town so men could go hunt the bear. Papa took us down to where they had laid it out on a concrete slab back of the Amoco station. The fur, streaked with brown mud, was wet and cold when we touched it. They hosed it off at the station and the water ran pink into the street. They propped its mouth open with a stick, and we reached in and touched the teeth.
Mama was crazy about birds.
Chickadees are the least aggressive birds I know.
Along with their magazine the National Audubon Society sends me invitations to travel to places all over the world, even to the Amazon Jungle, with other members to look at birds.
There were more birds, more different kinds of birds, at Spring Hope than there are here.
Waterbirds—egrets, herons, gallinules, kingfishers, rails, ospreys, anhingas, grebes, and the like, ducks of all sorts.
And forest and field birds—owls, hawks, kites, quail, shrikes, cuckoos, killdeer, woodpeckers, whip-poor-wills, and so forth.
Warblers, finches, fly-catchers, thrushes, kinglets, nuthatches, tanagers, towhees, mockingbirds, thrashers, catbirds, vireos, always in the trees and bushes around the house.
Cedar waxwings and blackbirds arrived in great swirling flocks in the fall, crows and grackles thronged the treetops and strutted in the fields.
The many times pileated woodpeckers hammered at the house, digging for grubs of carpenter bees, ripping big pieces from the siding and excavatingfist-sized holes in the fascias and the tops of the columns, Verdell or one of my brothers going outside to shout and clap their hands or throw sticks to drive them off.
The bees themselves drilling neat little bullet-sized holes, buzzing furiously, while sending a steady stream of sawdust down past the windows.
The time Mama, looking out the window at a little drizzle of dust, said that one day there would be more hole than house.
I remember strangers showing up at Spring Hope, asking permission to look at birds, and walking out on the dikes with telescopes and cameras, even in December, in cold rain, or in September, in clouds of mosquitoes.
Papa going out to greet them and standing awhile talking, informative, gracious. Seigniorial is how he looked to me then, I think now.
Sitting in the kitchen talking to Maria about the birds at Spring Hope, not talking to her actually in a conversational way, just listing the different kinds of birds I remember there, and being aware that I am boring her silly but going on anyway, while Lester cleans under his fingernails with a tine of his breakfast fork, his eyes puckered.
The realization that I have become a tiresome old person.
The time Verdell built a whole stack of bird feeders out of wood from the chicken house and set them out in a row on the back steps, Mama coming down to look, and later he mounted them on creosote posts that he planted around the yard in such a way that standing at any window in the house we could look out and see birds, and every year or so putting up new ones to replace those that had rotted away.
I remember liking the way creosote smelled. Telephone poles, railroad tracks, and the bridge over Johnson Creek smelled of creosote on the hot days of summer.
If I close my eyes and think of summer, a variety of sounds, pictures, flavors even, floats into consciousness, but I don’t smell anything except creosote and dust.
I have an image of my mother as viewed from the back, standing at a window with raised binoculars.
And another of her making the rounds of the feeders, adding seed from a metal pail.
The time sleet was ticking at the windowpanes and Mama was outside in Papa’s big canvas jacket.
The time she chased Thornton around the house trying to put her ice-cold hands down his
My mind, I want to say, is like a cage full of dead birds.
The time when I was six and somebody spotted a bear in the river swamp, the first bear sighted there in thirty years. Businesses closed all over town so men could go hunt the bear. Papa took us down to where they had laid it out on a concrete slab back of the Amoco station. The fur, streaked with brown mud, was wet and cold when we touched it. They hosed it off at the station and the water ran pink into the street. They propped its mouth open with a stick, and we reached in and touched the teeth.
Mama was crazy about birds.
Chickadees are the least aggressive birds I know.
Along with their magazine the National Audubon Society sends me invitations to travel to places all over the world, even to the Amazon Jungle, with other members to look at birds.
There were more birds, more different kinds of birds, at Spring Hope than there are here.
Waterbirds—egrets, herons, gallinules, kingfishers, rails, ospreys, anhingas, grebes, and the like, ducks of all sorts.
And forest and field birds—owls, hawks, kites, quail, shrikes, cuckoos, killdeer, woodpeckers, whip-poor-wills, and so forth.
Warblers, finches, fly-catchers, thrushes, kinglets, nuthatches, tanagers, towhees, mockingbirds, thrashers, catbirds, vireos, always in the trees and bushes around the house.
Cedar waxwings and blackbirds arrived in great swirling flocks in the fall, crows and grackles thronged the treetops and strutted in the fields.
The many times pileated woodpeckers hammered at the house, digging for grubs of carpenter bees, ripping big pieces from the siding and excavatingfist-sized holes in the fascias and the tops of the columns, Verdell or one of my brothers going outside to shout and clap their hands or throw sticks to drive them off.
The bees themselves drilling neat little bullet-sized holes, buzzing furiously, while sending a steady stream of sawdust down past the windows.
The time Mama, looking out the window at a little drizzle of dust, said that one day there would be more hole than house.
I remember strangers showing up at Spring Hope, asking permission to look at birds, and walking out on the dikes with telescopes and cameras, even in December, in cold rain, or in September, in clouds of mosquitoes.
Papa going out to greet them and standing awhile talking, informative, gracious. Seigniorial is how he looked to me then, I think now.
Sitting in the kitchen talking to Maria about the birds at Spring Hope, not talking to her actually in a conversational way, just listing the different kinds of birds I remember there, and being aware that I am boring her silly but going on anyway, while Lester cleans under his fingernails with a tine of his breakfast fork, his eyes puckered.
The realization that I have become a tiresome old person.
The time Verdell built a whole stack of bird feeders out of wood from the chicken house and set them out in a row on the back steps, Mama coming down to look, and later he mounted them on creosote posts that he planted around the yard in such a way that standing at any window in the house we could look out and see birds, and every year or so putting up new ones to replace those that had rotted away.
I remember liking the way creosote smelled. Telephone poles, railroad tracks, and the bridge over Johnson Creek smelled of creosote on the hot days of summer.
If I close my eyes and think of summer, a variety of sounds, pictures, flavors even, floats into consciousness, but I don’t smell anything except creosote and dust.
I have an image of my mother as viewed from the back, standing at a window with raised binoculars.
And another of her making the rounds of the feeders, adding seed from a metal pail.
The time sleet was ticking at the windowpanes and Mama was outside in Papa’s big canvas jacket.
The time she chased Thornton around the house trying to put her ice-cold hands down his
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