Week 13Fall Week 13
Winter is almost here. We haven’t had a hard freeze yet, but the Yankee robins have returned from their nesting grounds up north to join the local robins in big, noisy flocks that rival the starlings for boisterous debate. The stars shine more precisely in the cold sky.
Though the nights are chill, the days are mostly sunny and sometimes almost mild, as in very early springtime. And every morning now, the bluebirds come back to the nest box where they raised their babies last summer. They pop their heads in and out through the doorway, and often the female climbs all the way inside while the male sits on the roof to keep watch. If she stays too long, he clambers down, too, to hang in the doorway. He pokes his head in like the impatient spouse he apparently is. I don’t know if he’s worried for her safety or merely curious about what’s taking so long in there.
I’m a bit surprised to see them because of all the ruckus that has erupted nearby. Yet another builder has torn down a house and is putting up a huge new one in its place, taller than any other on our street. There is a constant hammering and sawing, an endless procession of giant trucks coming and going, grinding their gears and beeping. Radios broadcast music all day long, and the carpenters sing at the tops of their voices as they fling heavy two-by-six boards straight up to each other, floor by floor. When the workmen leave at the end of the day, the crows come to investigate, stalking along the roof beams and peering into the scaffolding. The bluebirds ignore them all, crows and workers alike.
Unperturbed, they come every afternoon to eat the mealworms they know I will put out for them toward evening, and every morning they return with the parade of construction vehicles to explore the nest box they know so well. They look for all the world as though they, too, are planning for the future, setting things in order for babies to arrive once winter is past.
What they are actually doing is reasserting ownership of the box. Instead of roosting in trees on bitter nights, whole families of bluebirds will gather in a nest box or tree cavity to conserve body heat and take shelter from the elements.
“But this is where we raised our babies,” I whisper to Haywood at night.
It is our endless conversation, now that the last of our parents is gone, now that our children are grown. We don’t need all these rooms. We are tired of the noise and the traffic and the pollution of this growing city. We can hardly find our way around it anymore, so lost are the landmarks that once told us where we were. Two of our closest friends have made plans to leave when they retire, and two others have already bought the land they’ll build on out of state. What if we found a cabin of our own in the woods somewhere not too far away? What if we downsized the house and upsized the yard?
But I tear up at the very thought of leaving this house full of memories, this neighborhood full of friends. I think of the baby nestled on my shoulder as I rocked him, patting his warm back, and the toddler who climbed into our bed after a bad dream, and the little boy teetering on a two-wheeler while Haywood ran beside him, jubilant. “You’re doing it!” he would call as our boy wobbled beyond his reach. “Don’t look down!” I think of the neighbors whose children grew up with ours. For all these years we have fed each other’s dogs and watered each other’s tomatoes and seen each other through terrible struggles: illness and infertility and postpartum depression and divorce and troubled teens and dying parents and, most devastating of all, the loss of a child. It is far too late to forge such ties in a new place.
I think, too, of my wild neighbors. What would happen to the butterflies and the red wasps and the patient skink who suns herself on our stoop? What would become of the shy rat snake and the cranky mole who makes our yard a welcome landing place for wildflower seeds? Who would leave out pans of water on hot summer nights for raccoons and opossums and red foxes to drink from?
“I don’t think I can leave,” I say in the dark. “How could we ever leave?” I am trying not to cry.
“It’s OK,” Haywood whispers back, pulling me closer.
Every day I stand at my window and watch the bluebirds, and then I look past them to the cheerful competence of the human builders clinging to the scaffolding of the house that is taking shape under their hands. Standing before the sun-filled window of my own warm house, I can’t help wondering what springtime will bring. I am far from feeling any confidence in the future, but when I look at the busy tableau before me, something flutters inside—something that feels just a little bit like hope.