The house is so still without our little bird, so quiet and ordinary. It lacks the ambient sounds of a parakeet in motion. I don’t turn on the radio as much as I used to, because it reminds me of him, too, and so the quiet is compounded.
Into this void has come the winter fire, which lights the hearth, opens clogged sinuses and fills the house with smoke. (We need our chimney cleaned, I think.) What it also does, I’ve noticed recently, is provide some much needed noise.
The fire roars and crackles. It provides some of the background sound I’ve been missing so much since Hermes died. It doesn’t replace him, of course, not in the least, but it is a slight consolation.
Sitting beside a fire is like keeping company with a wild animal; there is a hint of danger in the sudden shifting of wood, the burning log that falls from the grate. Outside the temperature falls, the wind sighs. Inside, our hearth is bright — rhe consolation of a winter fire.
The winter stream is a study in contrasts. In some places a layer of ice like the skin on just boiled milk stretches from bank to bank, puckered and wrinkled and vaguely flesh-like. The current pulses beneath that thin shell, and water pushes out a few feet downstream where the creek is not yet frozen. The flicker of life as the stream erupts there reminds me of the play of tiny insects on the summer surface.
In other places a ripple of white ice has formed and it bobs beside logs and patches of leaves. The flowing water rushes past it like a dark, living thing, like a large, furtive fish. The creek is shallow at this point but the banks are steep. If you look down you can see in the winter current a hint of the riotousness of spring.
Snow has been scarce this winter, but frigid air has been plentiful. Many days it’s been served up with a stiff northwest breeze. I’ve kept walking along the frost-hard trails and through the grit that accumulates along the side of the roads. I’ve done it for my sanity, to thumb my nose at the season — and to soak up whatever mood-altering sunlight I can.
It was 7 degrees this morning when I woke up. Seven! Seven makes a lovely time, age or chapter. But not temperature.
These chilly days remind me of my years in Chicago. Seven degrees above zero was balmy in that city. One day I learned after I’d already left for work that the school where I taught was closed for the day. It was 21 degrees below zero (actual temperature, not wind chill). I’d grown so accustomed to the cold that I hadn’t wondered why everyone was running, not walking, down the street.
It was winter that drove me from that city. Winters can do that, you know.
I often walk to music — radio music, that is. I have an iPod but it’s old and barely holds its charge a half an hour. Besides, I haven’t loaded much music on it. In fact, I never really made the switch from LP to CD. Much of my favorite music is on vinyl. So for years I’ve contented myself with whatever our classical station serves up. This is probably just laziness on my part, or perhaps a willingness to be surprised, to take what fate hands me, aurally speaking.
I was thinking of this in terms of what I wrote about yesterday, the “Big Sort.” Not only are we segregating ourselves into homogeneous clubs, churches and communities but we are also reading custom-tailored news and listening to carefully selected music.
The world is big, complex, confusing. We need the comfort of sameness and exclusion. But trying a new activity, listening to unfamiliar tunes or chancing upon an article in the hard copy of a newspaper gives a necessary eclecticism to our lives. It means we’re looking out windows instead of into mirrors.
In The Big Sort author Bill Bishop writes about our tendency to live in evermore like-minded communities, worship in evermore homogeneous churches and vote in evermore polarized elections. The subtitle of his book is “Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” People who associate with people just like themselves tend to become more extreme and lose their ability to compromise. The middle disappears. What you have left is a lot of people on the fringes, shouting at each other.
Demographic data show that people who live in the far suburbs or exurbs tend to be conservative, while people who live in cities tend to be liberal. As a walker in the suburbs, I pay attention to the cars in the driveways and the bumper stickers plastered on them. And I know that, while northern Virginia has trended Democratic in recent elections, our neighbors are a congenial mixture of political types. Gun-toting NRA folks happily loan their snow-blowers to environmentalists who only own shovels.
One of the things that slows or stops the Big Sort is devotion to place. When we don’t vote with our feet, when we stay where we’ve landed — or (even rarer these days) where we’re born — we deny the Big Sort the demographic movement it requires. Census data released earlier this month shows that the share of Americans who made a long-distance move dropped to a record low of 1.4 percent. It’s the lowest level since the government began recording this statistic in 1948.
This morning I write from my office, overlooking the alley I described yesterday. My desk is positioned so that I look out not only into the alley but into the street beyond. On this cold day walkers scurry in and out of my line of sight. A man with a hand truck crosses the street, a bike messenger zooms along with the traffic, pilgrims shuffle to Starbucks. Everyone is hooded, gloved and booted. There is little color in this world; it is monochrome this morning. But it is moving. A world of swirling shapes in gray and black.
I’ve always liked alleys. It may simply be a continuation of my love for narrow streets. Or it may be because alleys are alternative universes, passages that take you behind the scenes. The front of a house or store is what the owners would like you to see; the alley provides another glimpse — the dirty laundry (sometimes literally). In an alley you see the garbage cans, the old car, the rusty rake or shovel (or, in the case of the photo above, a window on moving day).
Unlike wide thoroughfares, alleys are cozy for the walker. You feel nicely held in by them. They are comforting. Unless they are dangerous, which of course they sometimes are.
My office window faces an alley. It’s a broad, well-lit alley, as alleys go, a working passage with a small loading dock. When my office suddenly goes dark I know it’s either because the sun has gone behind a cloud or the UPS truck is making a delivery. My alley isn’t dangerous, but questionable characters have been known to wander there and do things they wouldn’t do out in the open.
Ice coats the streets, sidewalks and cars. Schools are closed. It’s time for fantasy travel. Today we visit Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia. It’s a misty July afternoon and the roses are still blooming. Daylilies and larkspur are thriving. The air is so perfumed and moist that walking through it feels like an instant facial.
After a stroll under the rose arbor into the Japanese garden, you find a little tea shop, sip a cup of Earl Gray and sample a scone or two. Then you wander some more. You snap photos, lots of photos. You gather all sorts of ideas for your garden back home — then you realize that none of them will work because you don’t live in the Pacific Northwest. But you feel good just for imagining what might have been.
Some religions have household gods, mostly beneficent (occasionally mischievous) beings who look over the house and bless it with their presence. For nine years we have had such a creature in our house — our parakeet, Hermes, who died Saturday. He had never known a day of sickness and lived a most happy life. And because of him, we were happier, too.
When we bought Hermes for $17 from the local pet store, Suzanne was in seventh grade and had hours to spend with the baby bird. She coaxed him gently onto her finger, moving her hand ever so slowly up to her face so she could look at him eye to eye. His little striped head bobbed up and down as he sidestepped back and forth on her finger. Suzanne liked to mother Hermes and every night would read him the story “Goodnight Moon.” Before he was a year old, Hermes began saying the words “goodnight” and “moon.” Later, more confident, he strung together “goodnight” with “Hermes.” Soon he added new words to his repertoire, “I love you” and “good morning.”
Our house was livelier in those days. The phone was forever ringing, the radio was blaring, children were bouncing balls and skating through the kitchen. All was chaos and Hermes was in his heaven, bobbing above it all in a wire cage suspended from the ceiling.
The children grew up and entered their own lives, but Hermes remained, talking, singing and sneezing (he learned to mimic a human sneeze — apparently we sneeze so much that he thought it was our call). Hermes chirped when he heard the garage or front door open, or when the water was running in the sink. All these noises he knew intimately, because they brought people to his side — his flock, his family.
Maybe it’s because he could talk, but there was just something about Hermes, the way he cooed when we were close together, his intellect and his emotions, that made us love him all the more. And he was such a plucky little guy. Even his last day with us he was still chirping and sneezing and ringing his bell. Hermes weighed only a few ounces but he filled the house with his love. It is quiet without him.
Because of Hermes, I have a higher opinion of all animals, especially parakeets. Because of him, I listen carefully to the sounds of our house. Because of him, I have developed the habit of looking up. Hermes lived longer than I ever dreamed he would. But he didn’t live long enough.
Most mornings I sit down to write a post with very little idea of what I will say. But last night I decided to write about the snow cover, how this week only one state out of our 50, Florida, did not have it.
But when I started to write this morning I thought about the sad events of last Saturday, what our country has been through this week, the questions we have been asking ourselves. I make it a point not to cover political and social topics in this blog, but still, with all this on my mind, did I really want to write about the weather?
So I sat and I thought, and I moved to a quiet corner of the house where I could think better, and I decided … to write about the snow cover. About the planet that looks so serene and blue from space, and how it would look if a large chunk of it was gleaming white.
I know the snow is sparse in some of the southern states (including our own). I know it would barely make a difference if viewed from on high. I also know that our lovely blue planet is anything but placid.
