Hello, dear readers. The essay follows below, but here’s a quick note first.
I decided to make this one public and free, going rogue from the “regular” “schedule” because many of you are caring for loved ones in cognitive decline. It’s something many of us will end up doing at some point. I felt it would be worthwhile to find the buoyancy inside one of those stories while telling as much truth as I can.
I wanted to say a couple other things:
1) I’ll have a new book of poems coming out in in the next month or so, and I wanted to put that on your radar. It’s called Ceruleana, and it’ll be coming at us from the good folks at Nine Mile Press. More details to come.
2) If you’ve been considering upgrading so you can get one of these essays each week instead of one each month, I’m here to say go for it. Now’s a good time. Here’s a special to get us through the dog-days (applies to both yearly and monthly subscriptions and lasts for one year. You can cancel at any time):
OK, now on to the writing. Thank you, as always, for reading.
Caroline
My children are feral. One will only poop in the yard and hasn’t had its hair washed with soap in more than three weeks.
The other has figured out where its convalescent mother hides during the day, knows that’s also where the yarn hides, and does mysterious things to the cache of skeins at unseen intervals, leaving toddler crop circles on the quilt.
The structural reasoning of these arrangements lofts like the unanswered question it is, or a like a poem, through the forensic afterthoughts of a tired mother.
Mostly I am profoundly satisfied that I can read where she has been in the room, even when she’s gone, out on adventures with other people who love her.
It feels like the skill of seeing through time.
*
My friend is having trouble with sentences. She’s in the later stages of cognitive decline. She and her husband are also the two people most responsible for me becoming a birder.
I spent many hours as a kid riding along with them and my parents on birding trips, watching them find and talk excitedly about all kinds of species, binoculars always at hand. Susan brought the brownies, which is to say Susan brought the humanity. (She iced them, friends.)
Susan was the person who could both go for hours looking for grebes between swamp rushes and the person who understood the undue burden which this exact brand of whacked-out behavior places on anyone, especially a young person. She knew the extraordinary value of this experience for a six-year-old and that there would have to be some allowances, many of which involved high quality chocolate.
Besides learning that her first bird, her gateway bird, was the Pied-billed Grebe, what I remember most from those times is her laughter.
*
A sample from the plus-minus of having feral kids:
Minuses
yard poops / felted hair in the back of the head / ruined puppet shows / can’t make it through “happy birthday” song without screaming and running
Pluses
“Mama an airplane flew over from east to west” / “I hear a Carolina Wren teakettle teakettle teakettle” / “the moss is green again not brown” / “we saw a dead mouse crunched up it didn’t need its body anymore it’s compost now it feeds the plants”
*
I taught a course on bird identification and bird literature for a few years, a first-year writing seminar to help students adjust to college life, reading, and writing. I figured that if they could identify the forms of life around them, it would help them feel they had a place here in this new spot; if they could know, by ear or eye, over a hundred local species, they’d have opened their senses and become receptive to some degree; if they could manage the demands of weekly quizzes, they’d have numerical feedback about how they were managing to absorb information. The writing would come later, once we built some receptivity and a sense of practice.
White-breasted vs. Red-breasted Nuthatch audio— ask yourself this, I would say: does it just make you smile, or does it make you laugh? If just a smile, it’s White-breasted. If you laugh right off the bat, because it sounds like it’s pinching its nose, that bird is a Red-breasted. The way each piece of the world made them feel was something they could track, and we could follow that together towards things like curiosity, patience, and proficiency. Maybe some knowledge. Maybe compassion.
Out of the few small batches of students who went through that class, maybe thirty-some in total, one became a field ornithologist. I still watch her social media posts with pictures of the rare warblers she’s out banding in the deep woods.
The rest, I assume, like me, went on to do other things.
*
A writer friend recently shared a Naomi Shibab Nye poem that made me smile, and laugh, and laugh.
Lying While Birding
Naomi Shihab Nye - 1952-
Yes Yes
I see it
so they won't keep telling you
where it is
I spent decades pulling this stunt. When you’re out with seasoned birders, the list of things that they see, and you will never see, is far longer than the list of things you will share in the seeing of.
Accepting this and moving along the perimeter of its asymmetry is part of being a learner, which is to say part of being a human. Nod and smile, find Susan, ask for another brownie. Dabble in believing that the birds the others insist they’re seeing do, somehow, actually exist.
Eventually, I became a birder as well— the person who perceives the invisible, impossible things that no one else is tracking, the loony-toon who flails and stabs the sky while others get too hot and wilt and become very ready to go home. The good news is that it looks as though I may someday be joined, mid-flail, by one or more of my children. The better news is that we can also be the people who bring brownies and are very ready to go home.
*
Most mornings I’m awake before 5am, thrumming with steroids, which I’ve been issued to aid in the peanut-butter-dripping-off-a-spoon pace of recovery from a nasty autoimmune flare. I take sleeping pills to grab 5 or 6 hours away from the racing steroid brain, which I have named Annette Bening (as she was in the film American Beauty / do yourself the favor of clicking this link) because from 4:43-7:12am these days I enjoy doing things like alphabetizing the tea cupboard and washing the ceiling with a Q-tip. The sleep aids make me stupid, so when you put it all together, I’m extraordinarily motivated and dopey. It’s a sloppy combo, but one that yields a lot of happiness.
I still hear, and name, the birds outside, especially just before dawn, when they’re the only other ones awake inside the limits of the world I can hear.
*
Two nights ago I had a dream that Susan was speaking in long, robust, complete, ripplingly clear sentences, and we were laughing together about the sudden joy of communicating so easily. I texted her husband to tell him about the dream. He replied that she was still struggling to form sentences and words during the day, but that in the middle of the night, she often speaks in long strings of perfectly clear sentences, and she laughs a lot then, too.
My therapist says part of what’s so painful about Susan losing her words is that it’s happening while I watch my children gain theirs. The intersecting, inverse trajectories are remarkable to witness.
*
My mother, who is also a friend of Susan’s, discovered a year or two ago that post-diagnosis Susan enjoyed caring for an old baby doll of mine, which she resurrected from an oversized cradle filled with stuffies in my childhood bedroom.
A mother herself, Susan knows the patterns and gestures of caring for another, smaller figure. They’re so ingrained, even from more than fifty years ago, that when my mother dropped Dolly-O off at Susan’s house, her husband reports that she was able to calm down a bit and become chatty while she held the doll in her lap.
Maybe the pathways of love for children, once activated in the brain, are like the pathways of verbal communication— so essential to continued life that they sometimes travel more safely below the radar, below the sight-lines of our sleep and even our ultimate declines, breaking through now and again to prove that we are somehow in tact, in ways we might never have understood or appreciated. That maybe we always have been, and as we change form, we may remain so.
That’s a hope we only stand a chance of hearing if we listen, attentively, for the next unidentified song.
Indigo Bunting. Purple Finch. Scarlet Tanager. Some kind of nuthatch…
Does it make you smile, or laugh? Start there.
Wonderful description of Symbolic Experiential teaching or Symbolic Experiential Therapy!
One of your best and most uplifting! LOVE the handmade wandering outfits!
It is wonderful the way your memories of, thoughts about, and grieving for Susan wove through and knit together this piece. Thank you.