08.02.23
I wander downstairs around nine each morning, which, compared to the mornings I’ve had at my apartment lately, isn’t half bad.
I am upstate at my parents’ house, where I was meant to watch the dog while they were in Provincetown for the week, but now the circumstances have changed, and they opted not to go. I decided to still come up to help out a little around the house, and get in some time spent with other people, people who love me. I’ve been pretty lonely lately.
My mom and Nana have generally been gone already by the time I roll out of bed, but today I stroll into the kitchen to find that my dad is also out of the house this morning, at the State Park, attempting to run four to five miles (his words, via countertop note). I dump the remaining coffee from four hours ago down the drain and reset it for myself. While it brews, I watch a little, fat, brown bird sit on my dad’s feeders outside the kitchen window above the sink. I think of some Elizabeth Bishop poem that I half-remember (A pity not to have heard / the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird / who sings above the broken gasoline pump / in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: / three towers, five silver crosses… I looked this up, rest assured I cannot quote “Questions of Travel” off the dome — though there is probably some college version of me who would pretend I could. I once memorized “Annabel Lee” so a boy with a Pulp Fiction poster would think I was interesting — a humiliating venture for an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old, particularly so in retrospect but even at the time).
I’m startled by another bird flying into the window in my periphery. My mom has a blown glass hummingbird ornament hanging in the window, on the inside, so while I know birds are prone to fly into windows just because of the reflection, I don’t exactly think we’re setting them up for success, what with another bird seemingly existing on the other side of what turns out so harshly to be glass.
I pour myself a cup of coffee and go out onto the porch on the side of the house. I have fifty pages left in my book about the Sackler family but have struggled to finish it in the last couple of days, even though I absolutely could have. I’ve been feeling a little scatterbrained, and having a hard time focusing. I hear the dog coming down the stairs inside the house, rising from her lazy mid-morning nap to come join me on the couch outside. A hummingbird buzzes by me to reach a feeder to my right — my dad has a crazy amount of bird feeders, I think. He isn’t retired yet — he will be in November — but I think when he does, he’s pretty destined to become a big-time bird guy. That will be huge for him.
I watch two baby bunnies eating clover in the shade of the big oak tree that once held the since-dismantled treehouse of my youth. Debby (the dog — have I mentioned her name is Debby? The dog’s name is Debby. I always tell people she works at the DMV) is unbothered. She doesn’t notice them. Though even if she did, there’s a small chance she would not chase them, and instead try to approach them slowly, carefully. Less stalking prey, more fearful of scaring potential new friends. During the early months of the pandemic, when I was staying here, my parents and I would watch her approach deer who wandered into the field beyond our backyard fence, slowly and gently, just a little bit at a time. She would walk a few ginger steps, then wait, sit, watch. We would say that we were just a few more encounters away from an animal-best-friends moment, a video that would be played for some levity at the end of the nightly news.
My dad returns from his run and jumps in the pool. Debby sits eagerly at the steps, waiting to jump in, but we tell her not to, because she will be wet all day, and it’s barely 11am. She undoubtably will go in the pool today, at some point, as she does every day. Debby loves to swim.
