On reflection and reverie

being holed up in the house is really not so bad

“Whatever you plan on happening, never happens. Stuff you would never think of happens. So you just have to come on. Come on, come on, come on, come on...”

There’s a spattering of yellow waxy substance on the outside of the window that I’m sitting at this morning. Most days I look right past it, because it’s winter and cleaning it off can wait until spring. I remember the day it happened. The flicker looked up over the block of suet and suddenly caught its reflection in the window. In one powerful swoop, it opened its wings and flew straight at me— an iridescent golden blur. It hit the screen before hitting the window and spit out everything it had in its mouth (or possibly its stomach) violently onto the glass.

“That’s gross,” says my spouse Janyce.

“Well, that’s what happened,” I say.

I’m holding my coffee cup in two hands. The wind is blowing fiercely outside, whipping the powdery snow off the roof in billows, the chimes are tinkling loudly, and the metallic twists we hung to deter the woodpeckers from drumming on the house are knocking and sliding against each other. We sit, drink coffee, and talk quietly to this blizzard soundtrack outside. We never even notice the moment when the predawn blue slowly brightens to a hazy, wintry white.

As I write this, I’m looking at the photo I snapped this morning from our back sliders of the orange lamp lights glowing in the ghostly woods. Look way up at the top of the photo to the left corner. I so want that to be an owl, but more likely it is a hawk, or even a clump of leaves.

The other night we heard a god-awful screeching coming from this very same spot in the trees. I stood at the slider door with it cracked open a bit so I could listen. My son was home and he was in the kitchen talking with Janyce who was washing dishes at the sink, and the dog was roaming around, her nails clicking on the hard wood floors. I stood still for what felt like a very long time with my ear pressed close at the opening, smelling the cold night air, and waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness outside. The dusky light was similar to this morning’s bluish light behind the trees. I could barely make out two silhouetted lumps that appeared to be inching along one of the thicker branches. Eventually, I was able to see them more clearly. Two raccoons having a scuffle.

“I don’t ever want to hear that sound coming out of the woods again,” said my son on his way through the living room.

“Just raccoons,” I said.

Janyce is now humoring me and my backyard birding obsession by sitting beside me staring out the window. She doesn’t watch with me all that often. There’s also a limit to how much conversation she is willing to have, and how much loafing around she is willing to do. Even on a Saturday morning, in the middle of a blizzard, I know she is enumerating her “to-do list” silently in her mind.

“Wow, it’s bird eat bird out there,” she says.

I look up from my writing to watch the bluebirds finally figure out that they can squeeze themselves through the small opening in the new starling-proof feeder I bought for them and make it to the bowl of mealworms at the center. The starlings are pissed. They frantically jump from opening to opening and stick their head in as far as it will fit, beaks open wide. I imagine the bluebird at the center, calmly munching away smugly while the starlings get more agitated by the minute. It feels like some sort of justice for me and my beloved bluebirds. But seriously, it’s just the wildlife, doing its thing. It’s just life.

My front row seat at the picture window has me thinking about this beautiful film I watched the other night. My favorite kind of movies are the ones with a moody soundtrack and striking images that linger in your mind, where the setting itself is a character, and all that really happens in the film is that people just talk. Except, of course, everything happens when people just talk. The central theme in Mike Mill’s new movie C’mon C’mon is a line spoken by a precocious nine-year-old kid somewhere near the end of the film. “Whatever you plan on happening, never happens. Stuff you would never think of happens. So you just have to come on. Come on, come on, come on, come on...” It feels like a line perfectly suited for this particular time in the world. For all of us. For the meaning of life itself.

I look up from my musing and notice that Janyce’s “to-do list” must have won out because now she is gone.

“Did you really spend $295.00 on stuff for the birds?” said my ex-husband Jim as he was dropping off the bags from the wild bird store into our garage yesterday. He’s been stopping by the house more lately, helping us out with dog sitting and errands. “I need to get bonded with the dog,” he said. But I think maybe it has already been a long winter for us all and he really just wants to hang out a bit and talk. I’m happy to have him around, actually.

I stop typing for a second and notice the “white out” that is our backyard. These tiny flecks of snow are the kind that build up slowly and sneakily. Before you notice what’s happened, you are buried in a foot. Nobody is going anywhere and we’re not going to do anything today, either. Not if I can help it. I think back to the film. It was so good that I’m planning to rewatch it again today with Janyce on the couch, while our fire roars in the wood stove. I’m not going to tell her that it’s a movie where people just talk though. I’m simply going to leave this picture window soon and move into the kitchen to make a vegetarian chili and let it simmer on the stove all day. And then later, when it’s ready, I’m going to ladle it into big bowls with some corn chips on the side and sit on the couch under the striped wool blanket and call out to her, to wherever she is in the house, doing whatever it is that she is doing, and say, “Come on. The movie is starting. Come on, come on, come on, come on.”