The heater cycles off, and in the welcome quiet I hear the crunch of my mother’s crackers and a house finch singing in Aida’s back yard. I savor the sounds and the absence of sounds and the bit of cool, fresh air from the sliding glass door I have not yet closed all the way. I hear the sound of my pen scratching across the page in my notebook. For this one suspended moment, all is right with my world, and I feel like a writer.
Three white-crowned sparrows and a California towhee eat bird seed beneath the small ficus tree in my mother’s back yard. A spotted towhee runs out from his hiding place beside the house to join them, and his animated small self, his bright reddish orange and sleek black, so fresh and alive, remind me of the empty place in the pot of succulents where the dead spotted towhee used to lie, and my belly, full of echoes, hollows out.
I can hear the trill of a bird, a familiar, much-loved sound, but if I once knew who was making it, I have forgotten. My mother gets up from her computer game to wrap the fuzzy orange tube scarf around her cat, protection from the sliding glass door I’ve opened ten inches, desperate for “real” air and a connection to the earth. “It’s okay,” she says to Trie. “It’s okay.” Her voice is kind of sing-song, but it doesn’t bother me today. My mother goes back to her game, and I think how it’s likely just this reassurance she is wanting to hear, too. The familiar bird trill is further away now, maybe two yards over, and I hear a house finch singing next door. Yes, I think. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.
I sit down on the Adirondack chair, on the little raised deck like a dais, my bottom sliding over the wood, surprising and smooth as if it had been polished. (Now I want a chair like this.) I am on a ridge at Descanso Gardens, looking north over La Cañada and the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. I breathe, sigh, stretch my neck and shoulders, so tight these days. I try not to feel uncomfortable as people come into view and spot me sitting there. (I am so close to the intersecting paths.) I am glad when they all disappear again, and I remain. I rub my hands across the arms of the chair, soft against my palms. In the stillness of this almost-wilderness, I am the grateful, quiet queen of my domain.
The tiny baby rat
and the spotted towhee
whose little dead bodies I’d placed
inside the pots of succulents
in my mother’s back yard
and for weeks and weeks
I honored
and brought flowers to and
loved with all of me
have disappeared.
I tell myself maybe
it was divine intervention
but I only feel sad
and somehow violated
on their behalf
and mine.
I am grateful I got to see them
that one day
their two little heads
poking out of the nest
side by side
beaks to the sky
grateful the mama hummingbird
didn’t seem to worry about me
but as dear as it was
I can’t seem to separate my anguish
that mostly I missed
the whole thing
because I couldn’t be there
living by
my mango tree.
My orchid plant
and tiny shoots of the cactus
I brought home from Ajijic in 2009
sit beside each other on top of
the toilet tank
in my bathroom here
in my mother’s house
(together with the little
green plastic dinosaur who came home with me
from the hostel in the Marin Headlands)
and every now and then
especially after I water them
I stop and really take them in
rescued from my trailer home
by my dear friends
and somehow dear friends
themselves now, too
and talismans or hope or
living proof my little home
still awaits us all.
No Holds Barred 