a bird is not a bird

When I was a kiddo, I was briefly obsessed with peregrine falcons, I think because of a book I read. At the peak of this obsession, my dad took me to the Ornithology Lab at Cornell. Despite the extra oomph provided by that remarkable outing, the bird thing eventually did fade. I can’t remember what I moved on to but I do remember that what began as my mom’s sympathetic fascination with falcons never waned from that point, morphing only slightly into a fixation with red tail hawks. She loved the red tails roosting in Manhattan, and she tracked the skies here in the Berkshires for them all the time. Several years ago a nesting pair took up residence in the orchard next to my parents’ house and for a couple summers running, daylight hours were punctuated by the whining screeches of juvenile hawks calling for their mom to get their lunch and the answering sound of her telling them to catch it themselves if they were so hungry.

When her brother (my uncle) died, my mom decided hawk sightings were a visit from him, a fact that fully resurfaced for me when my sister (her daughter) died six years ago. In her last conversation with my mom, my sister said she’d come back as a bird for her, which was a kindness to a person such as my mom who was already prone to scanning for birds. It also made birds kind of a loaded thing for me, and since I live out in the sticks, seeing a bird is not exactly a rare occasion.

I don’t think my sister is a bird, and I don’t think birds look for me—not when I am having bad days or when I am having good ones. I think birds do their bird things and I do my person things and we cross paths and a thought or a feeling that’s already in the chamber of my mind, irrespective of ornithology, gets triggered.

In case this sounds cynical, I should add that I think this dynamic, this noticing and receiving, is a big, mysterious and magical form of grace.

After my mom died, last February, my bird encounters took on another layer of grace and grief.

To be clear, sometimes I see a bird and I wave and say hi, mom (or hi to my sister, depending on the bird). It can be a very low-key thing.

Sometimes it’s in another key.

Yesterday I saw a red tail when I was driving home and instantly began to sob, which was sort of a shock to my system (and to the dog riding shotgun). I wonder why that hit me so hard, I thought, and then drove another 50 yards and another one swooped so close to the windshield that I actually ducked and perhaps there was some screaming.

Okay, maybe there is a bird dispatch office and I have been put on the list of people who need symbolic gestures too dramatic to ignore and these bird dudes are motivated to deliver.

There by the side of the road, as my pounding heart recovered, my scrambled thoughts and recent increase in leaden feelings sorted itself into some coherence. A year ago, my mom was here for thanksgiving. A few months later, she died. There was no visit in between. This week marks the last time I saw her.

Maybe these are what my family calls “inside your head thoughts,” not for public consumption? I don’t think we talk about grief enough, though, and we make it seem like a shameful and secret thing, when it’s as universal as skin and needs company to make sense of it.

Maybe this makes you want donuts? Or you came here in search of just some simple food chatter? If a doughnut-approximating buckwheat pastry would do the trick for you, the method for making the ones in the close-up above is laid bare over here, at Rural Intelligence, where my food activites have recently been concentrated.