The first time she sees one, it is by the hidden creek, past the back field where they walk, looking for arrowheads. She is with her little brother, his crooked bowl-cut framing his face. They have worked all day, hauling wood to the back of the truck where their mother crouched, stacking it artfully. She does everything artfully. She’s an artist. The girl loves that her mother is an artist. The girl loves that her mother is different from all of her friends’ mothers with their tight perms and 1980s makeup. Her mother still wears bell-bottoms and boots she’s had for two decades and long duetting braids. Her father welds the chainsaw like it is part of him, and often he smokes a pipe at the same time. He loves this farm in the way the rest of the family does not, because it is owned by his parents. The girl’s grandparents. Today, they don’t matter. It is just her family working in the woods, and when the work is done, though she does not yet know it, she will see the bird, which is what we are concerned with.
The siblings take the grass path, wide enough for a tractor and uneven, and sometimes they break into a run just because they feel like it. Sometimes they talk, but mostly they don’t. She is 8, and he is 6, and they are best friends who share a room, and she sometimes imagines she is his mother. Sometimes, when her mom is cooking, she reads to him, and a feeling wells up when he sucks his thumb and touches her earlobe that she doesn’t have a name for. It is a love that feels part belonging and part ferocious ownership. Her little brother.
They enter the woods and ignore the stick weeds and the cockleburrs. They are looking for the crick. They’ll throw rocks and sticks and watch the currents and look for snakes. In the dappled shade by the bank, it sits, still as though it is carved out of weathered wood, and then it flaps its wings and takes to the sky, flying low enough that they take chase, sprinting, running in tandem, arms pumping, checking the sky. It was a dinosaur, sitting on the bank, and when it flew, they understood they had a pterodactyl on their hands. When the long prehistoric line of it was gone, they stopped, hands on their knees, gasping for air. Should they tell their parents or keep it a secret? Wordlessly, they began to jog, bursting with the story, the wonder, the awe of it. The lone living dinosaur was nested in the back crick. They would tend to it. Maybe the scientists would come.
The screen door slapped shut. Their parents knew immediately what it was. Their mother was delighted. Their father rushed to explain it in a litany of facts, and seeing her face fall and tears well up, insisted it made the blue heron no less magical, just a bit more ordinary. The girl went out to the tree swing, looked up at the sky past the oak leaves and felt mournful like something had been taken from her, but for the life of her, she couldn’t think what. When she went through the screen door swatted her in the butt, like it was in on some cosmic joke she didn’t understand.
*****
The Wild Bird Lady understands how fascinating Blue Herons are. A Google search pulls up her “Fun Facts” about their courtship behaviour. The male makes the first move and stretches to full wingspan, elongating his impressive neck and snapping his bill. He grows display feathers. In courtship, they pairbond in tandem flights, have beak duels and preen. On a winter’s morning, socked in by 10.4 inches of snow, YouTube offers up a video of a male and female heron, building a nest together in Florida. He brings the sticks to her, opening his beak, and she grips each one, singularly, and intentionally places them. When the nest is finished, they dance briefly, high-stepping and assessing one another. He mounts her, climbing in her lower back, wings outspread and for ten seconds they look like a two-headed-four-winged bird. He is all motion, neck telescoping up and up, wings moving to maintain balance. She is stoically patient, wings drawn back like sharp shoulder blades, head bowed as if in prayer.
*****
Blue
Nature’s storytelling in spinning
brings me round to another year
older, and the Eastern redbuds from afar,
are all impressionistic, hazy pink, purple,
and green, but close up are preposterous
with tightfisted buds. The very air
is slick, heavily scented and thickly pollinated
with conifer copulation, so much so
our eyes and noses go all itchyscratch,
but I can’t complain, given our coupling
just a quarter hour ago—the window sash
cradling the curve of the curtain in a soft sigh
just so. The sunlight spilt in and spooled
like a silk sheet, and your hand so fluid too
as it swept my hair out of our faces, so close
our breath braided and pleasure-lightening branched
my body in full florescence, in full, my love, in full—
a disappearing and emerging, a flight from,
and homecoming too, and for a long,
light-drenched moment, I couldn’t bear
to be touched, however gently, so full up
on touch
was I.
I am newly 48 and newly come from the best love of my life
when we walk, wind and sun lick, tickling our faces,
downhill toward the pond, where a Blue Heron takes
prehistoric flight—it perched as one being, a cloaked crone,
and flew as another, primordial grace of long, deep wing beats,
then landed, and let us catch up and look close enough to discern
black, white, and grey–the strange bearding of maturity before it flew again.
I am humble enough, I hope, to know its existence
is not some message for me, its sighting not an omen,
nor symbolic of anything beyond nature unfolding.
We braided fingers, placed palm to palm, and in my smallness,
in my frail and fragile, ever-ageing body, pleasure came to sate me
momentarily and all that blueblueblue sky spaciousness, all that
ornithological backdrop opened up inside me and offered flight.
*****
Look, sometimes you’re so depleted that even walking the dog holds no pleasure for the first 10 minutes, until you manage to pull yourself away from the work day like tape that’s gotten stuck to itself. It’s typically about the time you hit that tiny wood-shaded creek to the side of the park, which is really just a road around 4 acres of grass and trees that Killjordan Creek runs through. Banjo is pulling you hard, and you are sauntering, so you tell him so, out loud, “Banjo, I am sauntering, dammit,” and you think maybe life has gone and done it, just broken your heart and rubbed out your life and you wish you could pray. No lament. You want to lament. The world. The suffering. You want to tear your shirt and hold up your hands, and say why? And below that, you want to say why me? And Banjo stops to sniff because that’s his map of the world, scent, and in that stillness, you see it, sitting there, so still in the dusk that it had become dusk’s feathered shadow. You grapple for your phone for photographic evidence because here you were lamenting and about to tear your shirt, and just as you get it out and the camera open, you hit record and it unfolds its wings and the sound is a magic eraser for your head and your heart, and it is the sound of inhaling and then a terrific sound of wings beating, and you stand so still with Banjo, watching, your mouth the perfect O of awe. Inside, deep inside, you ask, “God?” Then you gather yourself and send a text to your atheist boyfriend with the video. Later, you watch it, and you hear your own voice saying, “What a gift”, and you have no recollection of saying that, and the voice is soft and contains none of the hard edges you had been bruising on all day long.
*****
It’s September. I am in Springfield, not Macomb. For nearly six years, we’ve been making this trip every other weekend. It’s starting to take a toll. We’re thinking about cohabitation. Shortening the commute. This is equal parts watery terror and moments of big curiosity. The leaves are already falling. We are walking the dog. He is so slow. It takes an hour to go a mile. We are scanning for the blue heron. It’s been coming back for three years. I watch it and let wonder roll through like a wave. I ask the dog where it is, and then think it may have left. “It’s okay,” I say out loud. Everything changes. Everything does. Earlier, I had held my youngest son, and we had wept, for how long? Time was different in that room, and in an hour we had unwillingly parted. I had left him. My partner holds my hand, even though our hands are sweating, and I am a bit above myself, watching us. I notice the way he casts glances at me. We have learned there are two herons. He has seen them together on his runs. When Banjo sees him running, he begins to gallop. My dog is in love with my partner, and sometimes we grin at each other, all love-oggling at our luck that somehow we found someone kinder, more decent, and loving than we’ve tried our whole lives to be. My partner had gone out, two nights before, to mail my letter to my son when the mailman hadn’t come. He’d gotten a card. He’d signed it “Love”, and when he sent me the photo, I stood in my kitchen, holding onto the counter, crying in the way toddlers cry–gasping for breath, their whole body the cry.
Then I hear a quaking squawk, repeated, and I look up and up, and it is in a tree I have never seen it perch in before, higher than I have ever seen it perch, and no matter the walkers, the runners, the bicyclists, I stop and point for Aaron, signalling, and crowing, “There you are! There you are! Hello you! Aha!” Inside, part of me is crumpled like aluminium foil, and I am trying to trust the earth beneath my feet, my son’s future homecoming and health, and that even if I fail and falter, I am worthy of love. The heron cocks its head, makes S of its neck, watches me from its perch, and I imagine myself from that viewpoint, and then out like a movie I saw in grade school, moving up and up and up. I am so small. I am but a dust mote. The heron cries out, and it is the sound of my suffering and my hope, too. Aaron squeezes my hand, a Morse Code of here I am. At this very moment, it’s more than enough. It’s so much.
