20

STITCH

Birch and I are at the meadow to bird-watch. He says it will help get my mind off Adam and his girlfriend and the zing of betrayal. Also, the embarrassing way I hid from NML — again.

A lot of people are at the meadow today, picnicking and whatnot. I knit while Birch bird-watches. The bees scurry around under my hood, like thunder in a cloud.

When I’m done knitting, I ask Birch if I can borrow his binoculars.

“Close your eyes,” I tell him.

He does, without question, because he’s Birch.

I slip the white knit sleeve I brought with me around one of the lens tubes. The sleeve I’ve been working on, which is black, I bind off, wrap around the other tube, and then close its seam as quickly as I can.

I used my arm as a measurement for how big around to make these when I planned this last night, and I’m relieved to see I was close. It now looks like Birch’s binoculars are wearing loosely knit wristbands. I made one black and one white to represent a soccer ball, a good luck charm to help him make the team.

“OK, you can open your eyes now,” I say, holding out the binocular strap.

Birch takes the binoculars and turns them over and around, examining them in all directions. “No way! Yarn bomb? For me?”

“Yarn bomb for you. Well, kind of like binocular socks for you in this case.”

“Lens warmers.”

I smile. “Yeah, something like that.”

“Everyone in my bird-watching club is going to love these,” he says. “They’re going to be so jealous.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“I would,” says Birch, who immediately puts the binoculars back on and stares through them.

After that we wait for something bird-watch-y to happen while Birch tells me more than I could ever have wanted to know about feathers, eggs, and wings. I get a whiff of sweat and grass and something else like peppermint sitting this close to him.

We wait some more.

I thread my shoelaces through my fingers and count picnicking people. When I get to 22 something finally happens.

Birch drops his cozied lenses to hang around his neck, his eyes, with faint circles around them, stretched out in wonder. “Look, look!” he says.

“What?”

He puts the binoculars up to my face.

“Look!” he says again.

“Where?” I point them around in all directions. There’s tall grass, there are people, there’s sky, and there are houses over there, farther away.

And then there it is. This beautiful bird. Huge but slender. It’s sleek and tall and graceful. Light gray with flecks of dark on its wings. It’s got one long feather jutting out from the back of its head. It flies above the meadow and then farther away and out of sight.

“What was that?” I ask Birch.

“A great blue heron.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“I’ve never seen one before. Where do they live?”

“They need to be near water, so that one’s probably headed to the river.”

“Wow,” I say. “I get it.”

“Get what?” asks Birch.

“Bird-watching. I get it.”

“Yeah,” says Birch. “And I get yarn bombing.”

And that’s when I get something else. Blue herons need to be near water, so they fly over the city to get to the trickle of a river a few miles away. What about bees? What might bees need to be near to make them fly away? I feel pretty silly for not figuring this out already. I’m just not sure exactly what to do about it. Yet.