A lightship full of birdsong

Four months later, the room I call my office is still full of boxes. Books, candlesticks, smaller boxes full of photos, postcards, a torn paper bag Ariel wrote me a note on, small unusual items I've determined I'm willing to die with. Mostly it's a room, but soon I'll feel me in here.

We bought a house this summer. I never got to show it to Cady. A few friends have come through—the kitchen was the first room I made ready. It's heavenly. I have every spice known to me and space for the ones that aren't yet, three kinds of rice, and four quarts of stock in the freezer, along with the last two soups I made. There's an old wooden bowl that's never empty and above the sink a wide window that looks out onto a courtyard half covered in flagstone, upon which sits a picnic table underneath a locust tree, on whose branches I keep three bird feeders at a reasonably respectful distance. The birds beef anyway. Lesser goldfinches, rosy-headed housefinches, pine siskins, three kinds of sparrow and doves (who it turns out are kind of dim and in addition to their iconic coo and wing whistle make one of the morning's most hideous calls, like a dog's squeaker on its last legs, I simply didn't know), white-breasted nuthatch, canyon towhees, wrens, a pair of curve-billed thrashers, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers—these are different kinds of woodpeckers—northern flickers, ladder-backed woodpeckers, and recently scrub jays and a flock of robins. Until two weeks ago, a single feeder could bring ten hummingbirds at a time, each one more ornery than the last. Sometimes I noticed one would buzz the feeder without partaking, then take up like a sentinel in the nearby elm, wanting a scrap more than sustenance. Who am I to tell any animal how to spend its brief and inevitably conflicted earthly hours.

The birds come to the courtyard where I can see them from the kitchen window, but not because I can. They come because there's food and water. I keep my priorities straight. In the summer there were no fewer than six discernible fledglings of different species, learning to forage and fly. It seemed to me like a sanctuary, a safe space, a nice place to raise kids.

You cannot keep me from my little stories.
This is how I'll stay alive.

I've spent more time these past months cleaning feeders and bird baths and pouring seed sloppily than unpacking boxes. Certainly more than writing. I haven't done the math but it feels true.

My home's original adobe structure was built sometime before 1900, but not by much. One story goes that the dining room was once a place for playing cards and a man was shot in the courtyard for shady dealing. Another story goes the chimney to the two-way fireplace between the dining room and what we call (though have not yet quite made) the library had to be sealed off. Too many mice. Too much nuisance. Imagine craving comfort so desperately you'd run toward flames. Or don't. We have choices what to do with our minds. I set mine to knowing my home.

In 1985, the owners carved a massive hole into the earth beside the adobe and built a sunken living room with a whole wall of south-facing windows for solar capture. From there you can see the dilapidated, patchwork chicken coop. It will take some love before chickens. There's an old shed out back whose bricks were made of mud and hay and behind that another half acre or so, grown thick with native grasses, cholla, a few juniper, saltbush, plants that poke and dare you to touch them, russian thistle growing three feet tall. They're starting to die and when they do they'll break from their roots with the first confident wind and tumble into the coyote fence that surrounds the property until we figure out what to do about it.

The answer is usually try.
Then keep going.

There's too much that's happened in the past few months and it'd be foolish to try and say everything, but I'm an idiot and this is where I've come for almost five years now to set things down. So here:

I've been to Chicago. Looked for signs of the fash and found whistles on my friends' keychains and necks. Sipped free wine with Richie. Shouted a poem in front of Lake Michigan. Listened to Charif explain how it is—we come into the world already in relation. Before we have even a whisper of self-awareness, a sense of who or what we are, we are mothered, brothered, smothered with ancestry, the culmination of some long-held hope or maybe fear. We are shaped by the people and places that welcome and whelp us and sometimes whoop us, given a story we'll figure out later, piece by piece, and rearrange however best we can. I forgot my favorite ten-year old's favorite socks.

I've been to a writing retreat for a week on a farm in the Catskills run by the people who made that movie about mushrooms, sat at the feet of brilliance, basking. Every morning I moved my body first. Left my phone in a different building, used my phone to figure out the name of every different tree I saw while walking around a lake local history seems to believe didn't exist before 1869. Strange, what civic memory holds onto. Wrote two, maybe three poems—the first I'd tried since April. A fun trick I came up with when struggling to write anything was to start by telling Tanja. Here's what you do, you write "Tanja, [whatever you want to say here]." And then all you gotta do is figure out the next line, and the next one after that. Good luck.

I spent two month's worth of Saturdays in Albuquerque learning with and from local artists. In our first week, we were asked to consider a project we could take on during our time together—something small, specific, creative. Something we could break down into one doable task a time and get done before our time was up. I had to pay for that retreat and thought why not make a chapbook. So I did.

I made a book and Nermin made it gorgeous. You can have one if you want. Turns out, I love going to the post office. Who knew? Not me. My mother, maybe.

We went to war with a field of goat head. It will take at least three years and many tactics to win. (Thank you Nicole for letting us borrow your weed torch. Thank you mom for the leather gardening gloves. Thank you Everything for fortitude. Fuck you colonization for introducing these to the Southwest along with all the horrors.)

I know now what I'm willing to do.

It's time for me to slip into my costume now and make myself different for a night. Before I go here's a poem. As far as I'm concerned it's perfect.