The Birds and The Berries

I consider myself a fairly outdoorsy person. I love hiking and exploring and camping, love the animals and the rivers and the breeze. But there is one particular tree that grows right in front of my apartment… I do not love this tree. Other trees sure-- but not this one.

My first semester here I spent two weeks combing my front yard for the carcass which was surely rotting in the sun, stinking up my apartment. In the end the tree was to blame, or the flowers rather. Turns out this tree regularly grows flowers which mimic the smell of a decomposing corpse in order to attract flies for pollination, a lovely addition to the preexisting aroma of urban Portland.

After the flowers came the berries. In the fall the death flowers give way to huge clutches of pea sized, bright red berries. They seemed harmless enough until they began to fall one at a time onto the sidewalk below, from where they were tracked into my apartment and squished all over my living room floor. By the end of fall semester last year this had all made its way into my rapidly expanding definition of normalcy, however my relative hatred of the tree has persisted.

Today I was walking home from the Theatre and I was alarmed to find an entire flock of birds swarming in and around the tree. Given that I would have to walk beneath the flock of birds and risk being pooped on, I decided to wait for them to clear out a bit. As I was waiting I noticed that the birds seemed to be attacking the tree. I cheered them on for a bit before realizing that they were in the midst of a feeding frenzy. I watched as they darted and hopped around in a mad attempt to feast on none other than the berries of the death tree. The birds, it seemed, found the berries of the death tree to be quite delicious. The sight of the birds frolicking in the death tree inspired the realization that even the most obnoxious, seemingly useless things can be life giving.

That realization got me wondering; what would my life look life if I viewed every single bit of it, even on my worst days, as potentially life-giving?

The Move

In case you hadn't heard-- I am moving. Given that this statement is based upon the location of my prior dwelling place I am inclined to clarify that while I will still be attending college in Portland my family will be moving from a house in Graham to a house in Lakewood. This process involves the purge of my entire childhood's worth of random belongings, a process which has proven equally terrifying and liberating. The other day I took a break from packing to write about it.

Worn

7-25-14

Angry music as I box myself

The tape’s invisible strength rivals that of my fear

Misshapen piles of material time

Gather dust on tall shelves

Where even the shadows cannot reach.

Stepping stools initiate the purge

Followed by black plastic closure-

Uninhabitable and yet overflowing.

Childish tokens of times long past

Persist with worn edges

And cut through and through

Until

Blank walls are covered in cascades of dust

With only the shadows 

For decoration.

Learning About Cows

Yesterday I went to class. I go to this class every Tuesday evening and for an hour and a half I babysit Eric- the chunkiest most adorable toddler this world has ever seen. On Tuesdays his mom drops him off in the classroom and we play. Now ‘playing’ can mean a lot of different things but this is how it looks for us:

Eric chooses a bin of toys which I pull out of the closet and open. Then he picks up each toy and hands it to me asking “Dada?” to which I reply the name of whatever toy he is curious about. We methodically make our way through the toy food and the farm animals, and sometimes even the building blocks, in this manner for the duration of our time together.

This may seem to rival counting toothpicks in terms of excitement but I am here to assure that the reality is quite the opposite. With each new name a flicker of emotion contorts Eric’s face into a full triple chinned smile of sheer joy, and it is this face that pushes me to continue with my lesson. The best part of the lesson is that I don’t have to teach it.  Although I do provide Eric with the names and functions of countless toys, he is very much the teacher. 

See, I am learning how to appreciate every bit of this life. A wonderful example of my most recent lesson- Cows.  When Eric first held up to me a little plastic cow and asked “Dada?” I explained that what he was holding is commonly referred to as a cow, and that is makes the sound “Moo”. Anyone over the age of five would agree that this is the truth but Eric was not so sure. He shot me an incredulous look and asked again, this time with the full authority of his 36 months of life “Dada?” Those two syllables seemed to demand a reason for the inexplicably mundane single syllable label which I was attempting to affix to this black and white splotched piece of plastic.

At that point I could not help but to look at the situation from Eric’s perspective. His thought process may or may not have sounded something like this: “What is this thing? Cow… is that supposed to be its identity or did you burp? Why are you looking at me like this is so important? It is just a piece of plastic…. What is Moo? Is this Moo you speak of another attempt to explain my black and white plastic or are you yawning now?”

Watching his face I felt obliged to explain to Eric why cows are important, how they contribute to our society, what they look like in real life, and he found this amusing. Not just a little amusing, Eric laughed until he was forced to support his little pot belly with the aid of his hands on his knees, drooling all the while. And I began to laugh with him. He was right, after all. I had no good reason to be so serious about the toy cow, or so bothered by his naïve ridicule. So we laughed.

Somehow this laughter allowed me the space to breathe more deeply than I thought possible. I drank in his joy and felt it spread through my own body like an airborne contagion. “How do you see things so clear and simple?” I asked him. Without another sound Eric’s grin grew to rival that of the Cheshire cat and he let himself fall, arms open wide, towards me, as if to answer “Like this.”

I Believe I Can Fly

Behind my tiny apartment at Warner there is a patch of grass- so small that I hesitate to call it a backyard- where several fruit trees have grown bowed over from the ever present Portland precipitation. The next door neighbors (not Warner students) have an actual backyard where they have allowed at least a years’ worth of weeds and random growth to accumulate into a small jungle type habitat from which they feed their cat along with the local raccoon population. Between the readily available cat food and the leftovers that my other neighbors like to toss out their back window, you can imagine the variety of ‘wildlife’ that frequents my apartment complex.

One of the only reasons I open my blinds anymore is to watch the birds that flit around between these three yards, collecting food and hopping around like little kernels of popcorn in a microwave. Yesterday while I was cleaning the kitchen I had the blinds open and I noticed a flash of color amongst the customary finches and juncos.

It turned out to be a Western Scrub-Jay (pictured above). I stopped bleaching the kitchen sink to watch it fly across my field of vision four or five times before settling on the lowest branch of a fruit tree just outside my window. Sitting on the kitchen table now, I watched the bluebird look around as if surveying the area before hopping up to the branch directly above him. One by one the bird slowly made his way to the top of the fruit tree and I couldn’t help but to laugh. Why didn’t it just fly to the top? Flutter-hopping looked like a lot of work, especially when he could have been to the top with two flaps of his wings. I mean, if I was a bird I would definitely have flown.

I think….

Right?

Lost in thought, I didn’t notice when the Scrub-Jay finally took flight. He was just gone. I got back to bleaching the sink but soon enough my thoughts returned to the bluebird. Maybe he didn’t fly away, maybe hopped away. I didn’t actually see that part so he could easily have left either way. What would I have done?  I would love to say with certainty that I would fly away with the breeze- but I would surely be lying. As a bird I would clearly have the ability to fly; two wings, hollow bones, thousands of feathers, my body could do it. My mind, however, is a different matter entirely. Holding the image of that little blue jay in my head I began to tally up the times in my life that I have chosen to hop rather than to fly.

Metaphorical or not, it turns out I am a full-time hopper…. How embarrassing. I have always admitted to hesitancy to trust people and situations, even God. But the thoughts that the Western Scrub-Jay brought up seemed to point to a new variable- myself. Because if I know that I am able to do something and I still choose not to do it out of fear and doubt that is all on me. Nobody is telling me that I can’t fly (at least nobody worth listening to) and I’m pretty sure I have left the nest  so the question now is: Why the hell am I still hopping??

Needless to say the kitchen is spotless now. In the time it took me to form that simple question I washed the dishes, scrubbed out the sink, wiped the counters and swept the floor. Like it or not I have no good answer.

The blinds on the kitchen windows are still open.