american gold finches and hawks

While writing I have been visited. After my father died last August and briefly took on the form of a hummingbird in my mind, I have the uncanny though pathetic fallacy that birds are telling me something. I'm trying hard now, nearly a year later, to see it as a lovely coincidence that amazingly beautiful birds visit me while I'm writing. It makes sense that while I write about plants and birds, and I'm sitting still, I would see something through the window in front of my desk. Today I saw what I think is an american gold finch, the first I have ever seen of whatever it is-- truly bright gold with a touch of black on its wings. Its color set against the green pounced at me like a parrot or a tropical fish reminding me that I am still a tourist having moved between micro-climates in the Bay Area in my ten years here. The question is really who is visiting whom?

My son and husband are in Reno visiting his family, who are struggling with our brother-in-law's newly diagnosed leukemia. I'm home struggling with my newly diagnosed pregnancy. Just talking to Doug on the phone he told me about the hawks living in his mother's backyard. We were up there last weekend and our son Jackson checked out the hawks and immediately gave a pretty good impression of their calls. We thought it was maybe just wishful thinking, but now we know Jacks has that hawk call down. Just now I heard him make the call while talking to Doug. Those hawks are not just "visiting;" Jacks' in direct dialogue with them. The hawks usurped a squirrel's nest high in a tree and seemed to have formed a ring of nests around the house. Last week the hawks were very much with us while we gardened with our three year old nephew, whose parents are both at the hospital full time right now. We planted a giant 100 pound pumpkin, contest-size, to be ready in time for Halloween. Who knows what this summer and fall will be like for our nephew; hopefully, nature will be benevolent. The hawks with their awesome feeding patterns are pretty brutal but magnificent also.

It's wrong to say we are visited by the natural world. Yes, tiny ants, famous in Berkeley, form giant Macy parades in our house whenever a grain of rice is left on the floor. We've decided to coexist with several spiders, about one per room. There's been a lot said already about the forces of life and death mirrored in the plant, insect and animal world. We humans like to separate ourselves from the others and use them as metaphors, and maybe that is why we are stunned, like a bound Gulliver, when we are felled by a disease or morning sickness or worse, death. I know my father found solace in only a few things while fighting prostate cancer: his tomato plants, his family, the hummingbirds at his feeder, New England coastal storms and the sounds of waves. A poem I wrote for his memorial service called "How to prepare for a storm," concluded with the directive: "let yourself belong again." It's ironic how language and thought make us feel apart, yet how language also brings us back.