Fourteen Years & Two Birds

It wasn’t until Paris that I realized birds meant something to me.

Years prior, I had bought a set of salt and pepper bird shakers I named Fred and Ginger. Birds were beautiful distractions on a summer day—the stagnant heat, the spotlight sun—and a bird would cut through the canvas backdrop. They were free at the silliest times I thought I wasn’t.

Growing up, an owl lived in the cottonwood tree by the bridge crossing the creek. His inquiries late at night became a lullaby to me. Then a mourning dove lived in his place, but I thought her coo was unique to her—and uniquely for me—until I got married and my husband and I moved into our first home. I awoke one morning to her familiar sound, and there she was on a fence post with her love-dove in response. Little had felt familiar those first six months of marriage, but the music of a coo brought the farm girl—now away from the farm—back to its music. And I wondered if anyone else found solace in these coos as I did, and for a brief moment, I was jealous that their sounds carried on into other homes, other ears, and other memories.

For our 6th anniversary, my husband and I checked off the most significant item on our bucket list: a European trip. His work was fun, but his workplace was stressful; meanwhile, I had just landed my dream job teaching at my university alma mater. Two days before our anniversary, we boarded a plane to Barcelona; however, over the course of the flight and for reasons unknown to us, when we landed, I was permanently changed. In flight, something happened—sharp, black-out pain, in and out of awareness—and I landed on the ground, disillusioned: who am I? hunched over: why am I in pain? shuffling: why can’t I walk? foggy: where am I going?

We dismissed it as jet lag or perhaps a cold, but I began to feel that this was bigger, worse, and more debilitating. To quote Fred Astaire, I worried that “there may be trouble ahead.” My flight mid-air left me closer to the ground than I ever thought was possible. All I could do was shrivel up, ball-like, and weep over the pain and the unknown.

From Barcelona, we went to Naples, Italy. While roaming the narrow, cobbled streets, Jerod distracted me from the pain by pointing to two birds on a castle fortress wall.

“There we are,” he said, pulling the birds into view in our Kodak camera.

From Naples, Italy, we traveled to Rome, Tuscany, southern France, and then Paris. On the plane ride home, I scrolled through pictures to remember what we did on our bucket-list trip because I was struggling to recall a day’s events—a mystery to us still. There was picture after picture my husband Jerod had taken of two birds: two birds on wrought-iron scrolled fences, on the Spanish Steps outside John Keats’ tombstone, in Rome outside the Coliseum, the Pantheon, San Pietro Plaza, and Piazza Navona. Two birds atop a privet hedge in Luxembourg Gardens, in the private gardens of Marie Antoinette, outside the golden gates of Versailles, beneath the Eiffel Tower, and encircled by honking cars beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

“We are free,” he said to me as we ascended, pierced the cumulous clouds, and hovered in a new land of white beaming with light.

Eight years later, on our 14th anniversary, I marvel at Jerod’s almost prophetic attitude. As life would become indescribably hard and painful, we would need to refocus our gaze on something and Someone higher, freer to deliver us than we would ever come to know on this side of eternity.

Last night, I was awakened by an owl outside our bedroom in the palm tree up the hill. Jerod was asleep—silent and still. The owl’s inquiries were just a reminder that I was stirring, and his utterance no longer lulled me back to sleep like it did when I was a kid; rather, it made me dwell on this new season of isolation we find ourselves under. I wondered if the owl was lonely, if he knew that we all were feeling alone in the deepest of night, and if only he knew I was listening—that he wasn’t forsaken.

This morning, Jerod asked if I heard the owl during the night. The owl wasn’t alone at all, and neither was I.

As we poured our cereal and milk for breakfast, I watched the birds outside hurry around the birdbath in our postage-stamp patio. Two doves landed atop our fence and gathered their feathered wings beneath their plump bodies for a second, but instead of settling down on top of the fence rail, they took flight—to home, I presumed—beyond the clouds.

Someday, I thought, we’ll be free.