Birding with Yeats: A Mother's Memoir (26 page)

The three of us looked at each other, mirroring one another’s awe. Nature was full of split seconds like this, and you needed to be observant to see them.

We felt fuller now, as we walked the rest of the way around the marsh. I certainly did and I could see it on the faces of Ben and Yeats. We were glowing with the circling of those gulls.

Gulls are notoriously difficult to identify. In southern Ontario we have mostly ring-billed and
herring gulls
. The Sibley guide says of the herring gull: “Variation in its size, structure, and plumage can create confusion with almost every other large gull species.” Also, the gulls are famous for inter-breeding, creating hybrid individuals which themselves breed, creating still new hybrids. The smaller gulls are easier to identify, if you know which ones come to your area, but even with those ones, I wouldn’t bet my money.

Those had definitely been Bonaparte’s gulls, though — they were small and white and had that telltale black head they have in breeding season. There are other small, hooded gulls but of the ones that are mostly white, none come through Pelee, unless they are really off their course. A whole flock wouldn’t be off its course. These ones we’d seen were headed off to Northern Ontario to breed and then, in the fall, they’d fly back to the Gulf of Mexico to winter.

Even though it wasn’t teeming with rain this year, the wind gusts hadn’t let up, and we decided to walk only the short route again. By the time we arrived back at the trailhead, people were approaching and heading off in the direction of the other section of the marsh, which probably had about a thousand birds waiting to be seen. We decided to leave that one for next year since it was already noon and we had a long drive ahead. We were wind-blown and tired from the relentless gale.

Yeats said, “Can we stand in the blind for a few minutes? Maybe something will come.”

Ben and I grunted our assent and Yeats stepped up his pace.

But we didn’t have to go as far as the blind. A small flock of dunlin appeared, flying wide circles low to the water. They glinted like jewels as they turned in the sun.

The dunlin is a medium-sized sandpiper with a reddish back and long, drooping bill. It breeds in wet, coastal tundra; these ones were probably on their way to Hudson’s Bay to nest.

Ben and I were standing together, me leaning against his chest, and Yeats was about three metres away. We were on a grassy laneway between two expanses of marsh, with the wind howling and our hands freezing in our pockets.

Then, it happened in a flash — a flash of birdwing and light, a flash of breath sharply inhaled, a flash of grace. The dunlin had swooped out across the pond and then, seconds later, flown straight towards us. But before they collided with these three people standing still holding their breath, they flew between us. I looked at Yeats and then at Ben, and we all slowly exhaled.

I imagined that I
felt
the birds fly past us,
felt
the small rush of air and the pulse of their wings, but I know I didn’t. It had happened too quickly to feel any such sensation. What I felt was this tremendous sense of belonging; that I belonged with these people and on this earth.

None of us spoke for a few seconds and then Ben said, “Holy mackerel! That was unbelievable! They were close enough to touch.”

Yeats and I nodded. Yeats turned around and started walking back to the road.

He said over his shoulder, “We don’t need to go to the blind anymore.”

He was right.

I said to Ben, “Thanks for coming with us this weekend. Thanks for wanting to come.”

“Thanks for having me. Happy Mother’s Day.”

He put his arm around me and we walked like that for a while, watching Yeats stride ahead, his long hair flying in the wind.

FOURTEEN

I WAS WAITING FOR
Ben in the car, facing south on Bay Street in front of the store, a Saturday night in May. He was exchanging one set of books for another, unpacking the trunk and filling it up.

We’d spent the day selling books at a symposium on health in the developing world and I was feeling depressed. The problems seemed insurmountable — war, famine, drought. What depressed me even more, though, was our unwitting complicity. A lot of money from our Canada Pension Plan fund to the Teachers’ pension plans of every province invested in the manufacture of small arms which made their way to conflicts worldwide and whose sole purpose, let’s face it, was to kill people.

And then there was the mining of those rare minerals, such as coltan, that we needed to run our computers, cell phones, and video game consoles, to make them faster and faster — mining that came with violence and rape. Someone had done the research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and when they’d laid the map of incidents of violent rape over the map of mining activity, the two corresponded. Seventy percent of the world’s mining companies had their headquarters in Canada, including many of those in the
DRC
.

So I sat thinking about these things and the pit in my stomach got a little bit bigger.

Just then a gull flew down between the buildings, going west along Adelaide Street and looping around in front of the car to fly up and east again, dipping its wings at me.

Not many birds down here,
I thought. Saturday night, lots of traffic and city noise. Not many birds, but one seagull, trying to tell me to get on with my life.

YEATS WAS NEARLY NINETEEN
now, in his first year of university, and mostly wanted to bird-watch on his own. I offered to go with him to Riverdale Farm, but he gently told me he’d rather go alone.

He looked sad and said, “Sorry, Mom. Riverdale Farm is special to me. I like being alone there.” He saw by my face, which I was trying hard to control, that that was not enough of an explanation. He said, “I talk too much when I’m with you.”

“We don’t have to talk,” I said, but he shook his head.

“I want to talk with you. I just want to be alone at the farm. Sorry.”

By now I’d arranged my face into a smile and I shrugged, assuring him it was okay and that maybe we’d go to the farm together some other day. Though right then they had baby goats, and I would have liked to see them.
Preferably not by myself
, I thought, but I didn’t say that out loud. I was glad that he was independent and I was glad he still lived at home. I knew we’d go birdwatching together again and this thing about the farm was small. Just a momentary heartache that would dissipate as soon as I’d written it down.

Parenting is full of heartaches, some fleeting and some leaving permanent scars.

I had a million memories of being at the farm with Yeats as a youngster and they coalesced into a warm spot deep inside, that same place accessed by the smell of decaying leaves in autumn or the sound of Cat Stevens’s “Tea for the Tillerman.” I wanted it to go on and on forever, but I knew it couldn’t.

One day our final time of birdwatching together will come, but of course we won’t know it’s the last one. If I thought about that for much longer, I’d be in tears, so I took a long look at that darkness and at my nostalgia, took a deep breath, and let it go.

Sometimes when Yeats went birdwatching alone he had a sadness about him when he set out and I wondered if it was because he was on his own. If he’d rather have a companion, maybe someone who wasn’t his mother. A girlfriend. Maybe he’d like to have a girlfriend. But I thought that was just my projecting. I didn’t think it was sadness, really. I thought it was just that moment of transition between being in the house where everything was safe and known, and being out in the world where life is unpredictable. He was never the kind of kid who rushed out, seeking the dangerous edge.

IT WAS LATER THAT
summer. The three of us stood on the deck at the cottage in the dark, listening to a pair of barred owls calling to one another. The farther one seemed to be on the other side of Fairylands and it made the usual
whoo whowho
call. The closer one was so loud that it may have even been on our island, but we couldn’t tell. It also called
whoo whowho
, but added a little descending tremolo at the end:
whoo whowhooooooo
. It sounded like a ghost or a demented opera singer. Each time the birds called, Yeats looked at me, grinning.

We stood out there for five minutes, listening, the dark forest enclosing us but our cozy cottage behind, with its electric light and Pippin sleeping on a chair. The cat didn’t bat an eye over these owls. Not much later, though, while we played cards, he raised his head and opened his eyes wide when a dog on Fairylands began to bark. The barking also silenced the owls and we resumed our play.

The next day I watched a raven eviscerate a chipmunk. Ravens seemed to be everywhere; we left some stale crackers on the railing and after they took them, they sat cackling in the pines around the deck. Perhaps they were thanking us, or asking for more.

I heard another raven farther off, making a loud, raspy, repetitive sound. The sound a young bird made when it wanted to be fed. Or the sound of the bungee-jumping toy sheep that Mom brought Yeats home from New Zealand years ago, a deranged
Waaaaaa
.

I found the bird in my binoculars. An adult raven was sitting on a high branch, feeding bits of chipmunk to its young one, who was making all the noise. I watched as the bird pecked and pecked at the chipmunk, which lay flung out upside down on the branch, its throat exposed and its belly being torn out by the raven. Ravenous.

The only time the young raven stopped its mesmerizing sound was when its parent stuffed a piece of meat into its mouth. I watched as the chipmunk’s belly grew bloodier and bloodier. I watched as the raven pulled out a piece of intestine that looked just like spaghetti. With its claws clamped tightly on the chipmunk, the bird pulled the intestine upwards as far as it could and then dropped its head down, letting the morsel sag. Then it twisted the sagging bit around in its beak and pulled again. It repeated this action over and over until it had had enough and gave a strong tug to set the flesh free. It had accumulated a good-sized bite, which it fed right into the waiting mouth beside it.

I had seen enough.

I MADE A CUP
of tea and took it down to the dock. It was early on a cloudy September morning and no one else was moving. Ben and Yeats were both asleep. The rest of my family was in the city and so were most of the other cottagers at our end of the lake.

The water was flat calm and the sun poked a ray through steely clouds, sending a carpet of jewels spreading from the horizon right to the dock. Two seagulls flew past, a couple of minutes apart, both of them adjusting their path so they could fly right over me. The loon kept calling, calling, calling.

I sat until the dew soaked through the towel I put on the chair and into my pyjamas. I’d drunk half my tea and the rest was cold, along with my feet in their flip-flops. It was time to go back to the cottage, but I couldn’t move. I needed to soak up as much of this scene as I could before heading back to Toronto and crashing into my other life — the life of a busy bookseller in a teeming city.

The transition to the city was always difficult, always required a conscious effort to stay balanced. Yeats transitioned now by going birdwatching as many times as he could in his first weeks back. I tried to go for walks, too, just around the neighbourhood, and I always scheduled a visit with at least one good friend.

When Yeats was small we had a really hard time with this transition, neither of us seeing the point in coming back to the city just so he could go to school. There seemed to be so much more to learn in the forest and on the lake. Those were the times when I thought of home-schooling, though that’s not the path we took.

Those early days of September, Yeats and I would leave the house a bit ahead of schedule and walk down to the school, stopping along the way to look at flowers and ferns and the occasional bird that caught our eye. It wouldn’t be long, I knew, before we’d be back to our normal routine, driving to school because I had to hurry on to something else, plunging back into our homework wars.

I reflected on the changes the years had wrought as I sat alone on the dock that glorious morning. Yeats was in university now and wholly in charge of his assignments; I had my work in the bookshop, my writing group,
and friends to look forward to. Our lives were evolving, and Yeats depended on me less to go birdwatching. He went on his own.

AND NOW, WINTER: I
peeked out the bedroom window to gauge the day. It was
7
a.m. and the sun wasn’t up yet. Grey sky one morning, frost on the balcony railing. Grey sky the next morning, no frost. Ribbons of pink in the eastern sky the next morning and I knew we would have rain or snow.

The sun rose into encroaching clouds, and I had long since dropped the edge of the curtain and gone downstairs to feed the cat.

What happened next in a day? If we were lucky, nothing out of the ordinary. Breakfast, shower, dress. Put the cat out and then let the cat in. Read the front section of the newspaper and note the weather in various spots around the world. −
15
in Winnipeg, +
30
in Singapore. Imagine for a second being in both of those places at once and spend a minute or two gazing out my kitchen window in wonder.

Thoughts like these came to me more and more often the longer I lived with a teenaged son. Questions of “Why?” and questions of the universe and endless questions and opinions about how to live in this messed-up culture. I suggested ways of seeing that involved being optimistic and positive, and while he didn’t exactly scoff he often became impatient. He needed to be in the forest. He’d said the previous night, for instance, that he had too much energy in his head right now, not enough in his feet.

I SAT AT MY
desk, gazing out the window at the first snowfall of the season. Ben and I had shared the morning paper together over coffee before he left for work. I would be joining him downtown later, but for now I was reading a poem on a friend’s website, a poem toasting a lifelong friendship. I was hoping for inspiration and just as I began to write, Yeats pressed play on his stereo in the room beside me. Cat Stevens began to sing his song about wanting to last forever, riding the great white bird up to heaven. I felt deeply moved. Not because I wanted to be young again, but because this day marked two anniversaries and the music brought on a flood of nostalgia. I wanted to slow time down.

It was exactly eleven years since I’d begun writing with The Moving Pen, my weekly writing group. I cherished that writing time and those women who sat around the table every week, bearing witness to our artistic selves. And it was twenty-one years since Dad died. While I didn’t dwell on that loss anymore, and it no longer caused me deep grief, it did sit in me somewhere, lightly. Played with me a little.

The passage of time. Here was a song that reminded me of death, and a poem that spoke of love and friendship, and a special day in the calendar year that marked my journey to a deeper self-awareness.

No birds flew past my window. No crow. No falcon. The trees stood naked and swayed in the winter wind, their branches covered in snow. I sat watching the clouds, being in my life, being here now.