Movement outside the sliding glass door catches my eye. It is the California Towhee, returned after a winter away. I haven’t yet put sunflower seeds out for the season, but its arrival reminds me that the time for this is nearing.
Just yesterday a hummingbird flew into the yard to investigate the red feeder I’ve let sit empty on the ground all winter. He reminds me, too, that the days are changing.
Time has slipped away again. In two days I will be another year older. There will be a new distance between myself and my past, another year to reach across when I remember how it used to be:
My black and white dog who always needed a haircut. The blood orange tree in the backyard. The vintage green vintage kitchen tile, a room just for my piano, and trees outside my windows in all directions. Now, entering my late thirties, all of it drifts further into the distance.
It took a long time—not long ago from the time that I write this—before I realized I could not get my old life back. I thought it would be there waiting for me once I fixed something-or-other-problem, but in retrospect, while I was patching myself up everyone else did what people in their thirties do: marry, have babies, move far away. Then the dog died. All the rebuilding I did, what was it for? Once I’d finished there was nothing and no one to go back to. A silent summer day: that was when I knew.
If the past is gone, then a person must do one of two things: be in the present or look to the future. I don’t recall making a choice so much as feeling semi-paralyzed for a while. To my credit, every day I made decisions as best I could, even if they were small decisions, which they were. Each morning I’d wake early, make a thermos of coffee and take my books and computer to the patio to read and work until the sun came around. Midday I would find reasons to leave the house: a trail to walk, an errand to run, a lunch outing, a beach day. I took a few trips to keep myself planning forward, and to maintain movement at a time when everything else seemed to have come to a halt.
Somehow, while going through these small motions, a new path unrolled on its own. Sometimes a person has to make an honest effort to see change, and other times all it takes is waiting long enough and change happens on its own. I got the latter and in my tiredness was, and still am, grateful for that.
In a way nothing is ever entirely gone. At the surface level, tangibly speaking, I have many of the same belongings: my blue throw pillow, favorite sundresses, the same pots and pans and baking sheets as before, and of course the piano. I suppose I also have the memories, which feels grossly cliché to say. On good days there is a glowing wonder of the life I once achieved; on bad days it cuts me in half.
This weekend it will rain and the birds likely won’t appear in my yard, but I know having seen today’s Towhee that they are on their way back for the warm season. There is a year-old jar of sunflower seeds in my kitchen drawer. When it is time—soon—I will place them in a small dish on the patio, and I will make a new batch of nectar for the hummingbird, one-part sugar to four-parts water, no different than last year and the years before that. I will let what is meant to return make its way back to me. The rest, we will see.
Notes on a Past Life
Worn and faded shirts loosely folded
into a pile at the foot of the bed signify
a hope I cannot seem to throw away
so I wash them again, almost believing
that it might still turn out differently.
One day I will realize: this is how it is.
Branches pruned from tomato plants,
in their moment of excision were meant for
the trash bin; but two months later they lie
on the ground by the garden pots and now
a spider has made its web among them.
Who am I to stop remnants and beginnings
from existing together in one puzzling circle?
Books I bought on my way back from the desert
sit next to books I bought one summer in Seattle
and next that, a cherry box containing
the ashes of a black and white dog who was
unflinchingly willing to listen to the piano and
for fourteen years often slept underneath
the bench, his chin on its pedals.
The receipts, a book of their own,
are a story of how I passed the time.
To supplement this: a gallon Ziploc
filled with every greeting card ever received
in which anyone I so much as half-loved
had written a personal note.
The red dress, proof of trying, of aliveness.
I thought I had given it away.
When I found it rolled up in the corner of
a cardboard box forgotten under my bed
I sat on the floor and held it to my face,
breathed it in, told myself I was strong
even if I hadn’t felt that way at the time.
Rat Poison
I need a new journal. I write almost daily now, about the garden and the birds in the yard and how much regret I feel placing rat poison out there. “Use gloves when you place it,” said the man at the home improvement store. I assume his advice is meant to save my skin, but instead he tells me how skittish rats can be about taking bait. “If they smell human scent on it they won’t eat it.”
I place the green blocks around the perimeter of my garden from which my tomatoes keep disappearing in the night. Six blocks feels like a good albeit violent number. In the morning two blocks are gone. Over the next few days The Rat(s) takes only half a block here and there. More tomatoes are missing. I will continue this each night until it stops.
Something about the man at the store makes me trust him. He leans casually across a small tower of unpacked boxes jutting out into the aisle. Black garden hoses still coiled. He carries pet treats around in his pocket and tells me other customers’ rat stories. He is warm without the fakery of being paid for it, and I do not catch him looking me over despite that I’ve come to the store in a red sundress. I think this must be who he really is. I will never find out for sure.
As he instructs, I do not use my bare hands when setting out the poison. I put it down each night after sunset, then wake early to gather whatever is left back into its zip-sealed packaging. I do this so that the birds visiting my yard do not ingest it. In a way, the garden plants and the birds and other animals I bring into my life (by choice) are my children. I could never harm them.
I have just finished the book “Small Days and Nights” about a woman who discovers she has a secret sister with Down syndrome, then takes to caring for her and eventually grows to love her new (yet frustrating) life. I wonder what life would be like–for me, for my sister, for my mother lying in her bed most of the time now–if my brother with Down syndrome had lived. Who would care for him today? I did not think much about this until I was older. The book brings him to mind.
It so happens that I have booked two weeks in Maine at end of August, where he was born and where he is buried. I visited in 2018 and meant to return sooner, but there is so much we mean to do that we don’t get around to, and all kinds of reasons to explain our choices to ourselves. Some of them are true.
Ben is buried next to my grandparents. He is so far from us – from me, from my sister, from my mother. He is so far away that I cannot see how he could fit into our lives if it happened that suddenly, magically, he was here.
Whenever someone says “Ben” I think of my brother. My mother might be bittersweetly happy that he is alive in that way. I know if I tell her this she will respond with the story of when they brought him home from the hospital to die and that he lasted for seven days.
She often tells stories more than once. Sometimes I will interrupt to say I have heard this one before, and sometimes I listen to words whose endings I already know.
I listen about Ben
thinking that it might be helpful
that it might be like praying the same prayer twice
The sun is setting and it is almost time to place the poison again. Two brown California Towhees have flown down from the wall and are scratching through a small pile of leaves, while a hummingbird sits near the feeder, almost a silhouette of itself at this dimming hour. In a half-hour I will put on my gloves and try once more to protect my garden and the birds and anything else I still have.
Following His Advice
I go to my father for advice.
He is dying, can barely speak.
It is January. The tumor eats him,
loves the taste of his brain, chomps
even now as I sit at the foot of his bed.
It takes a long time for him to make words.
This is what he slowly says to me:
1. It will be okay
2. It doesn’t make sense
3. There will be more
He is gone before February is gone.
Even the shortest month of the year is too long for him.
I held these words
behind my ears:
There will be more.
He was right.
One, two, three.
He was right.
(originally written in June 2020; edited in 2023)
Jade Vase
She brought the vase down to me last Christmas, jade and expensive, hand-picked during one of their annual road trips, after which they always came home with extraordinarily expensive purchases for themselves and for us, their two daughters. An upgraded wedding ring from New Mexico for her. For me: a three-thousand-dollar decorative saddle blanket, and an earrings-and-bracelet matching set studded with diamonds and Tiger’s Eye. And another bracelet, silver and ornate. I cannot recall what my sister received.
I had always wanted to inherit the green vase he’d brought home from one of those trips, and then I did. But five months after my mother brings it to me it remains bubble-wrapped in a drawer. Very safe.
What if I put it up on the shelf and a California earthquake causes it to break and smash apart? Wouldn’t that be a little like losing him all over again (and the $800 he paid for it)?
I protect this vase, his memory, my identity as someone from a certain type of family, holding on to all of these things until I can map out who I am when my ego is no longer so intent on framing my inability to lose.
Listen, I say to myself, I deserve to put this vase on the shelf.
After the pep talk I find a very stable shelf, low to the ground. This is where I start.
(originally written in 2019; edited in 2020 and again in 2023)
Colette Kay 