IT’S THE WEEK OF Thanksgiving. My brother arrives. We surprise him with a belated birthday party. Momma cooks a feast. I bake his heart-shaped cake smothered with Twix and Maltesers. For his gift, I found an edition of the animal encyclopedia we loved as kids. There they are, our pink-bottomed baboons, bush-tailed possums, and spider monkeys. Our koalas, chinchillas, and gibbons.
My sister arrives a few days later. Downtown Portland is fantastic. Oregon is spectacular for hiking, skiing, snowboarding. But when we’re all gathered, our parents can rarely pry us away from the family room, let alone the house. For work, my brother travels constantly. My sister runs hard in college. When we are home all we want is one another.
The two of them sit on the couch, laughing over a video on my brother’s iPad. Dad’s reading a book in an armchair kitty-corner to them. Momma’s conjuring art in the kitchen, about ten feet away. I’m in an armchair across from Dad’s. Snow flurries mist our windows. How the seasons have flown. We have grown closer as a family. I’ve initiated conversations previously untouched; they’ve started reading bits of this book. I have dismantled my little pink music box, and the notes have drifted away. Even echoes come to an end.
Next to Dad is a six-foot-tall birdcage he built from plywood and chicken wire. Two years ago, Momma bought four lovebirds. Presumably two males and two females but in actuality, three females and one male. She visited Bangladesh for a month and returned home to a gorgeous birdhouse Dad built as a surprise.
The male lovebird’s love is fluid; he adores the yellow, green, and turquoise birds equally. His stamina doesn’t suffer lapses or pause with seasons. He loves all three females all the time in an infinite continuum of spring that has sprung. The first year, none of the eggs grew into chicks. But this past winter, the birds began to breed.
We now have nine lovebirds. This house breeds love. The birds don’t sing in the dulcet tones of Disney bluebirds but with a shrill, machine-gun tempo and volume. Dad hates the birds. He built them a home because they’re Momma’s lovebirds. Merlot, Chardonnay, Rosé, Riesling, Pinot, Ardbeg, Talisker, Johnny, and Jack.
Nine birds, Zekie, Lucy, Bagha the cat, and countless fish. All happy, alive, loved, and safe. Momma has taken Angel and Carlos, the bearded dragons, as her classroom pets. Other teachers have gerbils. Momma has dragons.
I think of our long list of childhood pets. It would have gotten crowded, but here, they would have been happy, alive, loved, and safe.
This year spent with my family has been heaven. I have traveled my orbit. How I love that another word for orbit is revolution. The aroma of Momma’s cooking evokes a smile. From the moment I sat to write this book, there hasn’t been a day that I have denied myself food—anorexia, my shadow self, has healed. Through writing, I’ve undergone the strangest phenomenon. With each page, as I have stood witness for my child-self as she experienced one trial after another, giving her the words I wish others had given me, I’ve grown to value and love her the way I would if I spent one day followed by the next with any child.
The love has carried into the present. The same savage protectiveness I feel for my siblings and for all the children I’ve cared for, I feel now for myself. The nourishment I would give any child, I give now to myself. Now that love has replaced pain, I haven’t any desire to chase beauty or control. Here onward, the only power and purpose I will ever need and want is voice. By feeding my dream, I have starved my nightmare.
We, my love, are promise actualized. I love that every person in this room is far from perfect. No one is better aware of a person’s flaws than that person’s child, parent, or partner. Yet we love anyway. We choose to. We understand, forgive, and love anyway. Such sweet lunacy is possible. A simple miracle and, as you know, I’m a hedonist for those. The sound of the wind teasing the leaves. The way a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich can change a kid’s day or a chapter in the right kind of book can change an adult’s. The way my family manages to laugh anywhere, anytime, until Momma’s voice bubbles and curls like caramel simmering in a pan and age proves mine does too.
I cup these moments like newborn hatchlings, humbled by the abundance available in life. Love is the truest legacy. For years I’ve wrung my hands into tight knots, worried with changing the world for the better. But, darling friend, a theory: as long as we are catalyzing love, we are doing precisely that.
Lucy is snuggling with Dad, Zekie with me. The birds, the kids, the woman singing and dancing over pots brimming with her magic, her face alit with bliss.
Were her sari made of silk, none of us would be.