On looking for a sign

are the bluebirds trying to tell me something?

I believe in science. I’m drawn to scientific journals and heady books by sociologists and intellectuals, but I also believe in mythology and omens, too. Humans are full of contradictions. It’s built into us.

The other day the bluebirds came back. There were six of them, looking for a place to roost, and hovering mid-air around the bird box we hung on the side of the shed in our backyard. It’s the same birdhouse that the red squirrel co-opted as his own, chewing around the size of the opening so he could squeeze his whole body inside and fill it up with hickory nuts. The birds fluttered around the opening for a few minutes, poking their heads inside and then decided against it. All six of them flew off as abruptly as they had arrived.

“We have to put up the bluebird house this year,” I said out loud while standing in the living room and staring out the window hoping to catch another glimpse of them. “They were looking for the house and we weren’t ready,” I said. Janyce stopped folding laundry and walked over to stand beside me.

“Well, maybe we have time still. It’s not like we are going to get any snow this year,” I said.

“Oh my god, I’m going to start recording you,” she said. “You say that every year. And every year we get snow.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Every year,” she said.

This past weekend, I asked Janyce to stop the car so I could get out and snap a picture with my phone. It was a late November afternoon and there was absolutely nothing special about the vista before me, except for the way the sun’s angle was cutting across it, dividing the scene in half. Stark bare branches were illuminated across the blue sky at the top, and at the bottom, only hazy scrubby ground. It felt like an apt image to describe how it feels right now to be so equally divided from the truth, from the knowable future, from each other.

I’ve been thinking lately about how impossible it feels to get to the truth about anything anymore. About how I don’t really know what will keep us safe and what just might be me overreacting. Janyce wants us to let Celia come and clean one more time this month. We’ll leave the house, air it out before we return, and even wear masks for a few hours. Is that safe? My parents want to see us one more time before they leave and return to Florida. “We’ll sit distanced away from each other at the table,” said my mom. But that feels very unsafe and I can’t bring myself to do it.

Nicholas Christakis, in his book Apollo’s Way says, “there are many people, and not just those in positions of power, who have persuaded themselves that reality is ‘socially constructed’—that there is no objective reality, there is only that which we define using human faculties.” He goes on to explain in his scholarly and beautifully written book that the virus is real and it does not care how we see it or what we say about it.

I believe in science. I’m drawn to scientific journals and heady books by sociologists and intellectuals, but I also believe in mythology and omens, too. Humans are full of contradictions. It’s built into us. I read somewhere that Native Americans describe the bluebird as an omen and a mentor in their folklore, stories, and legends, and that the “bluebird spirit” comes with good news. I want to think that the bluebirds arrived in the yard that day to tell us something. It’s crazy how I want to find meaning in that, when in reality, those same bluebirds stop in our yard every November and December.

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It’s Saturday morning and I’m drinking coffee alone and watching it rain outside. Cars are splashing down our busy road, spraying water onto the sidewalk each time they hit the pothole. The forecast has called for snow today. It could be as much as a foot for where we live later this afternoon as the temperature drops. But right now I don’t believe it. It’s still 45 degrees outside and the tree branches are bending and swaying in the wind, weighed down by glistening silver raindrops. I’m mesmerized by the way they form at the very tip of a branch and drop, one at a time, one after another, in steady successive beats like a metronome.

A friend of mine sent me a text a few minutes ago and I decide to stop my morning reverie and take a look. It’s a video of grown men in Irish Parliament playing along with the Santa Claus mythology and adapting it to our new Covid times. I watch the whole thing and it makes me smile. This might just be the most wonderful expression of our absurd, deeply flawed, and yet so very human desire to turn the worst of reality into the the very best of fiction and to just believe. I’ll take that as a sign.

Do you know someone who might like to read this?