A Bird In The House
None of the weather that’s been wilting the continental US has shown up here in the San Juans, where it hasn’t yet crested 80 degrees. As with the rest of reality, I’ve lost all perspective on what weather even is. At 6am when it’s 56º, it’s mild enough for a t-shirt. At 3pm, 68º feels like 88º, but at 7pm and 64º, it’s time for layers and hat. None of this dissonance stops me from constantly checking the temperature on my weather app, as if that would explain things better, and the lack of any meaningful insulation in the house makes for even more sensory confusion, especially from my office on the second floor. Is the thermal confusion a phenomenon of this climate, the reality of living in an old house, or, because I am perimenopausal Goldilocks? The answer: all three.
Other than unpacking less than ¼ of my belongings, I’ve done very little in house since I moved all of my belongings up here almost a year ago. I would love to stop rifling through boxes and to exist in a less chaotic color palette, but I’d rather live with the kelly green, royal purple, canary yellow and hot pink walls now so that I can replace drywall and insulate later.
One benefit of sitting with everything as-is, is an emerging aesthetic: “Abandoned Scandinavian Coastal Cottage Chic," which I do realize is a design I've been working since the '90s. There is much about this living area that I would like to change (I'm talking to you, Hampton Bay sconces), but the shiplap wainscoting is starting to grow on me. In the kitchen, I made more counter space by putting a big butcher block slab over the decommissioned propane stove, and I finally unpacked my pantry, which I swear I edited before I left Portland yet still I probably own more varieties of paprika, fish sauces, and salt than any grocery in a 50 mile radius. But most of my kitchen equipment, which accounts for most of my possessions, is still in boxes.
My last count of edible fruit trees includes sour and Rainier cherry, apple, pear, fig, walnut, persimmon, loquat, plum, and peach, which is almost ready for harvest. It’s hard to leave fruit to ripen on the tree, but while I'm holding out for the peaches to feel less like baseballs and their green undertones to disappear, a few have ripened semi-successfully in a paper grocery bag. I just ate one. The skin is thick and tannic, and should be peeled. If it's not the best peach I've ever eaten, it's the best peach I've ever picked from my deck, and there will soon be lots. I predict that by this weekend I'll be working on peach mostarda (a sweet-sour condiment, not unlike chutney), preserves, and ice cream.
It’s not hard to imagine that in a couple of years from now, when the water is flowing and the trees have been pruned, that I could be baking all my favorite pies (in order: blueberry, cherry, rhubarb) with fruit all grown right here. Oh, I will need an oven by then as well. It's not hard to imagine, but not easy to pull off. “Nothing worth doing comes easily” and "The best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing" : quotes that resonate with me, both attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, a man with no small number of achievements and notorieties who also happened to be born on third base. Generally speaking, “work worth doing” is a choice, and in both mine and Teddy's cases, a very privileged one. I think a lot about whether I choose to do hard things because they are hard, or because they are worth doing, or for more complicated reasons that you generally uncover in therapy or through psychedelics...but on a good day I hope I am getting to that answer through hacking away at blackberry and pulling up so much tansy ragwort.
I also spend a good amount of time watching birds, which is not the same as bird watching. Bird-watching is a hobby. Watching birds is just about staring into the void and noticing who shows up.
Turkey vultures and bald eagles make their routine sweeps across the sea and land, resting in the old-growth trees that flank the bay. Hummingbirds are everywhere if you want them to be, and in the last two weeks I’ve been seeing and hearing more Canada Geese, a portent for the inevitable change of seasons. Spring was all about woodpeckers, and I never hear them now. Swallows are by far the most popular bird on this property, but what the American Robin lacks in numbers, it makes up for in presence. Robins are the Central Park Squirrels of Orcas Island - outsized and fearless. Make the mistake of parking your car under the Rainier cherry tree during its fruiting once, you never will again. Clayton says he watched one fly by with a snake in its beak. In one of two decrepit outbuildings, last occupied by my neighbor’s cattle, some robins built a nest on top of an old double tape deck, further proof that robins are the coolest.
Rural life is inspiring and humbling and the natural world is always there as a reminder that my Jenga tower of hopes and fears could topple at any moment. A bird (always a swallow) gets into the house through an open door almost once a week. A frog jumps through an unscreened kitchen window and sits in a houseplant like a ceramic figurine. I’ll come back from an errand into town, or walk downstairs to make a coffee, or be at the sink washing my hands, and then I hear or see something that isn’t supposed to be heard or seen indoors—the staccato, panicked flapping of wings confronting walls and ceilings for the first time. Birds in the house elicit (for me) a specific strain of terror that Sigmund Freud investigated about 125 years ago when he wrote about the uncanny, or unheimlich; the fear arising from something that is both familiar and unfamiliar, or inconceivable. It's the confrontation between what is known on a conscious level, “there’s a bird in the house” and what is perhaps only known on a subconscious level, “you are not in control.” That bird, such a sweet, beautiful thing to behold outside of my living room, might fly out the open door, or it might smash itself into a window trying to get back to freedom, or it might stage a mutiny and peck out my eyes. Whenever I think I'm brave, all I need is a bird in the house to remind me that nature is unpredictable, that control is an illusion, and that fear is irrational, powerful, and scariest of all, as truthful as it gets.
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