On marking your territory

what do you do if you have no idea what is coming next?

Is it better to see your future clearly and not know if you’ll ever get there? Or not see anything on the horizon but a blank page?

“Thanks to yours truly over there, I got one of my worst sleep scores yet,” says my spouse Janyce handing me a cup of coffee. It’s 6:00 am on Saturday morning and Janyce is up and dressed. I’m sitting up in bed watching a video from a motivational speaker I follow on social media. Mel Robbins isn’t giving me her usual 30-second optimistic tip for the day, but instead she is talking into the camera, looking tired and scared, with a reddish nose and no makeup. She’s more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen her. She just turned 52. Her TV show has been cancelled, her speaking engagements have stopped, and her husband wants to move the two of them and their son out of the home she’s lived in for 20 years to start a new chapter in Vermont. She doesn’t know who she is anymore or what is next. And she doesn’t like it.

“See?” says Janyce, turning her wrist to show me the 66 sleep score. “See all those red dips? Those were all the times he had me up last night.” I’m thinking about talking to Janyce about this video, but she is administering to the dog who is lying sprawled on the bed. I look past them both, out the window into our side yard, focused on movement I see in the tangle of vines.

“Poor thing,” she says. “He’s exhausted now.”

Our old dog is back on an antibiotic to lessen the inflammation that is making him cry to go outside every couple of hours to pee, at all hours of day and night, to stand still in a crouching position, claiming his space in the yard while nothing happens.

I’m seeing the same movement in the vines again and this time Janyce sees it, too.

“Holy shit, Kris, that’s a buck!” she says. “Wait, there are three of them.” We see deer all the time in our yard, but it’s a rare sight to catch a buck with its rack of resplendent antlers glinting in the sun. We watch for ten minutes, standing still at the window, as all three of them mill about behind the fallen tree trunks and brush, scratching their hooves in the leaves that cover the ground.

“What do you think all that scratching means?” I say.

“I think it means they are marking their territory,” says Janyce.

This past week, I was engaged in daily battle with a downy woodpecker. I could hear the drumming on the outside of the house while I was working at my computer in the office. I would get up and bang on the outside of the window, or run outside to wave my hands wildly and yell at it to get off. It would turn its tiny head to look at me, brazen and bold, and not move, as if it was fixed to the side of the house with velcro like one of those spun wool holiday decorations. Eventually the bird succeeded in making a perfectly round roosting hole through the clapboard and all the way through to the inside, claiming his space.

Just like the bucks and that tenacious woodpecker, I’ve been staking my own claim to space, too, lately, in a way. I’ve made some new goals for my writer self for the year, and every day I return to scratch away at each of them in the tiniest way, trying to make some progress. But at 54, I’m worried that it’s too late already for any of this. I’m worried that I haven’t done the groundwork I should have done 20 years ago. I’m worried that I’m spending way too much time possibly drumming a hole into the wrong tree.

Is it better to see your future clearly and not know if you’ll ever get there? Or not see anything on the horizon but a blank page?

I feel the same way Mel does, I think. I’m on the brink of another season of uncertainty, another season away from family and friends. I’m getting ready for the weight of winter, which will descend as it does every year, enveloping me in a cloak of cold and dark for months. Mel is trying to convince herself to embrace her fears and move ahead anyway, to go through the motions until she gets to a clearing of understanding. Maybe that’s all any of us humans can do, mark our territory and hope for the best. But the wildlife in my yard know exactly what to do next—instinctively, cyclically, dispassionately— and they’re getting on with it.