Week 8Summer Week 8
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In the end, the house where Haywood and I raised our children emptied not gradually but all at once. The oldest was long since grown, and even the younger two had been gone before, of course, off on travel-study programs, away at college for months at a time. But for two pandemic years they were at home more thoroughly than at any time since they had learned to drive. On their work-from-home days, I could hear them on the other side of the house, talking to colleagues on Zoom.
I was still teaching when my firstborn was small, so he went to his own “big-boy school.” By the time his younger brothers came along, I was working full-time as a writer, and it was more economical to have a babysitter come to our house. While I worked in my home office, they played with the sitter in another room. Having them home again decades later brought those sweet early days back to me with an ache.
Well, this is how it’s meant to go, I remind myself. In nature offspring don’t dawdle and dawdle. Certainly they don’t dawdle because they are worried about their old mama, working alone in an empty house all the day long.
Are this year’s bluebirds aware that only two of their first five fledglings survived? I don’t know, but they have built a new nest now, and for me the delight of summer has been those surviving fledglings—one male and one female—from the first clutch. Their breasts remain speckled with the spots of babyhood, and they are still begging their father for worms, but they are also pitching in with their young siblings.
The fledglings will follow their parents to the mealworm feeder, perching on the edge of the bowl and gaping. The older birds ignore them, picking up worms and flying to the nest box a few yards away. The fledglings eventually seize worms, too, and follow, fluttering a bit before figuring out how to land sideways, on the wall of the box. Startled, I’ve watched from the storm door as they, too, take a turn poking their heads into the box to stuff a worm into an open yellow mouth. I had heard of first-clutch babies helping to feed second-clutch babies, but I’d never seen it happen before.
Bluebirds aren’t community feeders like cedar waxwings, who remain in flocks even during the nesting season, a time when most flocking birds separate. Waxwings sometimes share resources, passing berries one by one, in a kind of avian bucket line, to birds who cannot reach the food themselves. Bluebirds are also not like crows, those intensely social birds who stay together in families for years and cooperate to drive away predators. There is some biological imperative operating with these fledglings that can’t be explained by normal flocking behavior.
I suspect it’s because the hot weather came very late this year, but when it came, it came with a vengeance. When these parents built their first nest, the damp days of spring lingered in the sixties and seventies, a temperature that prolongs the incubation period for eggs. By the time the female laid her second clutch, we were in the midst of a record-breaking run of brutally hot days—ninety-six, ninety-seven, one hundred, with heat indexes ten or twelve degrees above that. The female took to perching in the doorway of the nest box, perhaps to keep cool, perhaps to watch her mate feeding their fledglings.
In the heat of high summer, the second set of eggs hatched in record time, which meant that the fledglings had not yet dispersed to find their own territories. Emulating their father as they learned to hunt, maybe they had also learned to emulate feeding behavior.
This is only my theory. It’s possible the fledglings simply looked into the nest box, curious about what their parents were doing, and saw the giant yellow target that is the open mouth of a nestling. The compulsion to shove something into such a mouth appears to be inborn in songbirds—online there’s a video of a male cardinal, in the midst of his late-summer molt, standing on the edge of a backyard pond and faithfully dropping worms into the mouths of goldfish. “That’s not a mouth you can ignore,” a friend said when I showed her my photo of a gaping bluebird. “Nature wants that mouth stuffed full of worms.”
Whatever is motivating the fledglings’ behavior, it’s biological, not emotional, but something about this family tableau, spread out before me on these hot summer days, is making me feel better.
When our younger sons moved to the other side of town, they took so much of our furniture with them that there was a visible hole in nearly every room of the house they left behind, the house they each came home to when they were two days old. After they left, I walked through the rooms and thought about how much the house looked like the scene of a crime. Burglars broke in, tore everything apart, and took all our valuables with them. Burglars broke into my house and stole my babies.
They were such nice babies.
When I was building my own nest, I wanted every room to be a sign of welcome. Picture books on the coffee table, a rocking chair next to the sofa, brightly colored placemats on the table—all long before my firstborn had even arrived. For his aquarium-themed nursery, I made two dozen paper-mache fish to hang from the ceiling and invited each of our friends and family members to paint one. “Granddaddy made this fish because he loves you,” I imagined telling him. “Wibby made this fish because she loves you.”
The fish frightened him once he became a toddler. “Dat fish wooking mean at me,” he would tell us, coming into our room after bedtime. Haywood took down one offending fish after another, night after night, until finally there were no fish left hanging from the hooks that dotted the ceiling. But two years later, when we told our little boy that he would be a big brother soon, and that the baby would sleep in his room, he asked us to hang up the fish again so everything would be ready for the baby. His bravery gave me a new idea for what to say: “These fish are here because your brother loves you,” I would tell the baby.
By the time another little brother was on the way, our oldest had big plans for the room that would be the nursery. He chose a blue-and-yellow celestial motif, with paper-mache wall hangings in the shape of a sun, a moon, and three stars—one for Dad, one for Mom, and one for each child. For the ceiling, he wanted to stick up whole constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars. Years later, once that baby became a teenager, he swapped out the wall hangings for hip-hop posters and sports-team banners, but he never took down the stars.
Now this house is quieter than it has ever been, and I am nesting in reverse: giving away clothes my sons have outgrown, repurposing abandoned bedrooms, cleaning out closets to make space for items that have always been stored, by default, in the attic. Haywood and I are old enough now that we should really think twice before climbing the ladder into that attic.
The tiniest bedroom is now Haywood’s study. In the past, he has always done his work in the classroom, staying at school as long as it took him to come home free and clear, all ours for the evening. He formed this habit when our first child was born, but he is near retirement now, and soon he will need a quiet place of his own for reading and writing. He had his pick of empty bedrooms. He chose the smallest because it looks onto the bluebird’s nest box in the front yard.
Standing at the storm door, I watch the fledglings feeding the babies in the sunny box. There are many ways to be a family, I know, and some of them can take the form of a wonderful surprise. My children are grown, and I am ready for whatever comes next. But when the painters arrive to remove the dents and scratches and scuff marks of the growing-up years, I ask them to be careful not to paint over the growth chart marked on the kitchen doorframe. “And please don’t take down the stars in the little bedroom,” I say. “I want to keep the stars.”