Birdless
[image error]
The mornings I best remember are those of my elementary school summers. I’d wake up at 7 or 8 am, for no reason but the habit of school lingering into my sleep schedule. I’d have some cereal, and put on jean shorts, and a baggy cotton t-shirt, and black rubber rain boots, and the old green army backpack my mom got from Goodwill. It was filled with my explorer supplies–a plastic magnifying glass that didn’t actually work; a pamphlet about insects of the Pacific Northwest; a notebook and pen; and an old bandana that was starting to get holes in it.
I’d walk out the back door, where our border collie Misty would be chasing bees, or sleeping in her dog house, and I’d rub her velvet ears for a moment before passing through the gate. Misty would stick her muzzle under and watch me walk away. “I’ll be back soon,” I’d tell her. “I’m just going to the backyard.”
And, above me, the trees would rise, the great maple canopy painted soft-green in the sun. And the birds’ music would wash over me. Robins. Chickadees. Steller’s jays. Spotted towhees. Dark-eyed juncos. I didn’t know their names, back then, nor did I know the names of the cedars, or the lanky western hemlock near the creek, or the vine maples scattered amongst the ferns, the salmonberries, the invasive ivy, the native waterleaf, but, still, their songs were familiar to me. I knew them.
I sat on the mossy earth and leaned against the cedar, and wrote in my journal, and listened to the birds. Their voices wove together, a tapestry of trills and warbles that seemed themselves to be made of light. The creek rushed by. There were no mosquitos at 9am. And the world smelled like ferns, and the neighbor’s cut grass, and the distant scent of hose water on pavement, because my mom was watering the plants in the front yard. We didn’t have a lawn like my friends did. We had a long driveway, a garden of flowers shaded by birch trees, a side yard where Misty lived, cushioned by bark chips, and then, of course, we had the forest in the back. It was small, just a fragment surronded by suburban streets, but to me it was a great wilderness.
And those mornings will always stay with me. Because now the brids have nearly vanished. One or two robins sing each summer, rather than the old tapestry. Perhaps because the meadow on the neighbor’s property has been turned into houses. Perhaps because the forest floor has been blanketed over with invasive wild clematis. Perhaps because of climate change, and fewer birds in the world in general.
Whatever the reason, the forest feels silent now. So I keep those memories, the songs of birds whose names I learned only years later, the sound of my childhood summers, and I think back to the warm morning wind turning the trees in circles, how they danced and made lacy shadows agaisnt the creek water; how I sat on a fallen log and dangled my feet in the water, and felt the world breathe, a world which, to me, felt secret, a world I thought was infinite, one I never thought would end in silence.
