Homecoming

We call our resident scrub jay, “Bird.” Not very original, but that’s his name. Bird lands on the chair on our deck in a certain confident way. He announces by his unique body language that he is here. Here to be fed. We respond with a peanut, which he takes directly from our hands. Then he flies off toward the quarry, to a tree on the far side of the pond.

If we are momentarily oblivious to Bird’s presence, he coolly approaches the glass sliding door, close to where Jack sits inside at the breakfast table. Bird then proceeds either to squawk or tap his beak against the glass. (Sometimes both.) We are charmed. We drop everything and get him a peanut. He is already perched on his chair by the time we slide open the glass door. Using his beak as a precision instrument, he grabs the peanut and flies off to his hideaway across the pond. Bird has been visiting our house, and accepting our offers of peanuts, for six seasons.

Coming downstairs to breakfast each morning I pass the milagros on the stairwell, the little silver medals Jack and I bought on a trip to Santa Fe. That sideboard needs dusting again, my eyes tell me. How glad I am that I found this beautiful rug, my feet tell me as I pad across the deep red carpet bordered with indigo diamond shapes. Jack has already prepared our favorite breakfast, soft-boiled eggs placed into the blue painted eggcups I bought years ago at a monastery shop in Tuscany. Black Assam tea is steeping in the pea green teapot. The toast is ready to take out of the toaster—today it will be a fragrant sourdough dotted with cranberries and walnuts. Even if I request oatmeal, Jack’s default breakfast is soft-boiled eggs, so he usually goes ahead and makes us each an egg, which we consume while the hummingbirds outside our window keep us company.

Later, I cross the backyard and walk down the hill toward the pond, listening to my neighbor compulsively washing his car. He does this once a week. It is his ritual. The neighbor’s new cat, Dino, has already been out prowling the well-worn animal trail that threads across our slender back fence. All the animals use that route—bobcats, feral cats, deer, coyotes, raccoons. The perfume of their many crossings incites Dino’s daily stalkings; we see his black-and-white shape crouched into low-slung invisibility.

Bird’s wife, Mrs. Bird, returns each winter. Right now we suspect she is with egg. She comes close to the glass door of the deck, but then flies up to a branch to wait. We toss a peanut out to her. Only after the glass door slides shut does Mrs. Bird swoop down to collect her peanut. Then she flies back up to the branch to get her bearings. Mrs. Bird is an entirely different creature from her mate.

Watching them day after day, year after year, I no longer see “birds,” but have become engaged with individual birds. I have learned about them from watching the way they perch, their unique approaches to a treat. I have watched their flight paths from my hand offering the peanut to the willow trees across the pond where they have their secret homes. Certain individual birds make distinctive calls and songs.

Still, the variations of plants, weather, and animals repeat themselves in graceful fugues. I admire a trio of deer, a watchful mother and her two graceful fawns as they sail effortlessly over fences and hedges. A nesting pair of red-tailed hawks ride the air currents in ascending spirals until they arrive at the rendezvous point, back together on the same high branch of a cypress on the ridge. Gray squirrels fling themselves through the treetops to rob the jays of their hidden peanuts. Raccoons play and fight after sundown. Bats punctuate the deep turquoise of twilight while owls softly pierce the night with their throaty call and response. Back and forth they speak to each other at 4 am.

Autumn’s morning light seeps into the pond and quarry cliffs outside my window in ever-widening bands of orange. The orange is a new seasonal phenomenon; it’s not there in summer. The deepening colors of morning, the long indigo shadows invite me to consider the familiar landscape in a whole new mood. As the shadows lengthen so do the evenings—dawn gets lazier and morning comes while it’s still dark out. There’s a chill in the air that wasn’t here a few weeks ago. Tuning in carefully I listen to the leaves rustling in the trees. What do they say? They sound dry, like bits of dried parchment or cellophane. They’re no longer plump with moisture. I can actually hear autumn materializing. Dryness has made the leaves sound scratchy, more metallic, their mineral composition revealed as moisture wanes. Growing lighter, they are ready to release themselves from their branches.

The rise and fall, the spiraling of the seasons, departure and return: I am part of it all. The repeated rhythms are tangible, and I feel them in my body. The eyes see more than they are looking at; the hands feel beyond mere touch. Aromas scent us with place, the here as well as the then. The past lives on in our bodies, where it is always right now, always this moment and not a minute more.

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition,” James Baldwin suggested in Giovanni’s Room. If he’s right, I have to consider that other people have naturally grown into that condition, or were born with it, while I remained outside for so long. My irrevocable condition has been one of staying open to what unfolds in front of me, asking questions, being inquisitive. The home I longed for was less a condition than a transformation.

For me, home has become a chance finally to be in one place and to feel my connection to that place tighten and become intimate. I observe the Japanese maple in front, the way its color changes in autumn, its bare vulnerability in winter. I see the same coots in the pond fight their way joyfully into spring. I nurse the tangled nasturtiums through the rainy season—together (me fussing, they cooperating) we scoff at the idea that they are annuals and must be confined only to one lifespan.

My body tells me my place in the world. Home is something I can see, hear, feel in my body, especially my body as the bearer of repeated communion with the same place—the place, the seasons, the animals, the clouds endlessly varied, endlessly the same.

Once you’ve tasted a wonderful wine, a fully ripe tomato, a piece of dark chocolate, your body is forever tuned in a new and different way. The body acquires new intelligence, new confidence with this new knowledge. How our hands move reflects that mountain over there, or the car pulling up beside mine at a stoplight. These are the sensations that have called for my close attention and rewarded my attention by filling me with a sense of myself.

I agree with the author Don DeLillo, as he wrote in Underworld, that home is where you are most familiar to yourself. In my case, homecoming has also been an achievement, an active agreement between the universe and me that I will accept this moment; I will act upon this unexpected opportunity. Without action, there is no discovery, and without discovery, awareness remains shut tight. For me, seeking to live a life of heightened awareness has led to achieving a home in the world.

Once I stopped looking outward and stayed put, things changed. Home became the product of all of my physical actions, makings, tastings, and darings, and the weaving together of my joys with the person I love. Everything is deepened when we share our lives with others, or with one special other. Home is lying in bed at dawn next to Jack, feeling the warm shape of the bed around our bodies. Home is opening my keepsakes drawer to touch my beloved memory objects, or sitting at my desk and gazing out my window at the pond. Home is singing Mozart with my choir, meeting my friend Lisa for coffee, or smiling at a stranger on the street. These experiences and objects make up the unique shape of my home—my home in the world—and it is far more than a building with walls and a roof. Home is my arrival at a wide plain of acceptance and gratitude. Home is the self I have created, surrounded by the place that is mine. It is, simply, where I always am.