The owls in the palm tree
It's more like birdlistening, my friend said when I told her I wanted to get into birdwatching. Birds being one of those things you don't notice until suddenly, you do.
It’s more like birdlistening, my friend said when I told her I wanted to get into birdwatching. Birds being one of those things you don’t notice until suddenly, you do.
It was dark and I was in bed when I heard a shrill squawk. I picked up my phone, shrill squawk at night? I watched a video of someone lowering an owl out of their apartment window with a Swiffer. Another where a barn owl appeared silhouetted like a ghost flying between the clouds.
You heard them? My neighbor asked when, in the morning, I stared up at the redwoods around our apartment like I was looking for something. He pointed up to the date palm across the street and told me two barn owls had been living there for years. I squinted my eyes until I could see two white ovals asleep in a hollow part of the tree.
First it was the owls. Then in the spring, the hummingbird who worked parallel to me. I watched her collect pine resin and twigs the size of cherry stems for her minuscule nest. Sometimes she would come up to the window as if asking if she could trust me with it. In the summer a fledgling crow wobbled on the sidewalk in front of our apartment for a week before taking flight. I named it Baby Crow and Willy dug up worms for it to eat even though I thought he shouldn’t. FLEDGLING CROW I wrote in blue sharpie on a piece of cardboard because people kept trying to save it, thinking it had a broken wing.
*
I’m at a reading, I mouth to Willy over my computer screen when he walks in the door and looks at me like he’s not exactly sure where I am. I’m on the couch and I’m not. I’m inhabiting my square in a large swath of squares. My tangerine-orange sweater a kind of anchor for my eyes that wander in gallery view.
Sometimes I pin people’s videos at random not when they’re talking but just to watch them. When I tell my sister this she gives me a look as if I’m doing something illegal. It does feel strangely intimate, like watching someone through a crack in the door. But I like to fill them in. The shade of green on their wall tells me what kind of person they are, the snow outside tilts them north. I imagine their room, their house, the street they live on. Maybe it’s to push against this feeling I have when I leave my square—that I’ve been everywhere all at once and nowhere at all.
*
The other night my friend Shayda and I met up halfway between our houses like we usually do to walk. We took each other to some of the places in the neighborhood we like to come back to, that remind us in some way of where we are: the front yard filled with hundreds of wind chimes all clanging a different pitch, the Madrone tree that peels in the fall like a sunburn, the house on Milvia that is entirely blue— blue walls, blue trim, blue bottles that line the windows and catch little squares of light, even a blue trash bin in the front where the rest of the neighborhoods is black.
I love them, she says when I show her the owls. I knew she would. It’s after dusk and they’re huddled together in a blur. We stand there and watch them for a while until our necks get tired from looking up.
~~read&recommend~~
“Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough.” This perfect short story by Miranda July. Laugh and cry your way through POOG. Birding while black. On losing your sense of smell maybe forever. What was fun??? Snails on my face. The next book I’m reading. The tree bloomed/and I looked up