A bird-filled morning

This has been a terrible winter. My father recently informed me that he saw on the weather station that it snowed 51 out of the 52 first days of the year. For weeks, sidewalks and roads resembled ice-skating rinks. Temperatures hovered in the teens and single digits. The sky was white or gray, never blue. And still, in the morning, in the evening, I took Penny out for her short walks (Bill handles the long afternoon one, since he gets out of work before me). It was starting to feel endless, unbearable.

Toward the end of February, however, warmer temps (high twenties and low thirties) started to float in. A friend visited from California and my attempts to show her the view of Lake Erie from the Skyway failed thanks to a thick shroud of fog that clung to the water as its ice melted and evaporated, as rain instead of snow fell onto the city. By March 6, things had improved steadily. I wrote this down in my journal:

This morning, at least three different types of birds were singing in the trees, and the mechanical chirps of the grackle rung out as I watched one of them flit in between two small brick houses, then into someone’s backyard. The sun shone on my face, warmed Penny’s black fur even as we walked into a harsh wind: things felt possible again. I remembered flowers, heat, green, birds chattering all morning long—even though I could not see or feel or hear those things yet. I could sense they were coming, out only a little ways away, just beyond the horizon. Is that not the best feeling in the world? Not the actual arrival of something wonderful, but the knowledge, or memory, or certainty, that it will come, that it’s on its way. I think that is called hope, or something like it.

By this morning, March 13, temperatures had risen into the fifties, but dipped down again. It was rather bitter on my walk with Penny today at 7:30 am, but the trees were a chorus of birds. Grackles, mourning doves, robins, red-winged blackbirds, countless others I could not see or know how to identify. My decision solidified: yes, March is the second-best month to have a birthday. I no longer get to complain about being born in a cold month, because it is also a good month, even though it is also sometimes terrible.

This morning, I turn 41. I can’t really believe that number. I don’t feel 41, however 41 is supposed to feel. In some ways, I don’t feel much different that I did at 9, or 15, or 23, or 30. In other ways, I feel a lot different—but at the core, there is some heavy, thickly-braided thread of continuity, a part of me that is unchangeable and will be the same even as I face death, hopefully at a very old age, hopefully having achieved most of what I aim to. And because I don’t really feel very old, or 41, or whatever, I’m meeting my sister and her three kids at a trampoline park later this morning to jump around, swing into foam pits, whirl down curly slides and scream inside the tube just to hear that ringing sound (pictured above and below).

Since turning 40 last year (which my sisters made incredible—one planned the best surprise party, the other surprised me by driving in from New Hampshire for my birthday dinner a little restaurant called Mulberry in the city of Lackawanna), I’ve adopted a somewhat tilted view of things. I feel now, like I’m always counting backward from death, or aged disability. While 39 is hardly different from 40, something about the number 40 forcibly adjusted by perspective. I always find myself thinking: how many years left of this thing? If I’m hiking, I wonder: for how long will I be able to do such hikes? Even if I live till 90, I probably won’t be hiking then, or at least not summiting rocky peaks, so how long? How many more years will I be granted to do this? Everything feels like a countdown to my expiration date, and I don’t like it, but I’m not sure how to change the way I think about getting older.

I’ve always feared death. At age 9, I became horrified that people could die suddenly and without “good reason.” I became afraid to go to school, afraid of myriad illnesses or accidents, obsessed over my perceived pallor or any lump or bump or pain I thought I noticed. I forced my mother to reassure me, every night, that no one in our house would die in their sleep. My parents put me in therapy and while it helped alleviate immediate symptoms of anxiety, that terror of extinction has remained. I recall being nine, and looking ahead, thinking fifteen was an older, mature age. By the time I’m fifteen, I remember telling myself, I won’t be so afraid of all of this anymore. But of course I was, I still am—I’m just a little better at managing those fears, most of the time. I love the world so much, all of its beauty and birds and coffee and writing and good books and painting and laughing and long conversations and music and the woods and planting flowers and watching movies and baking cookies and getting or putting cards in the mail and lakes and streams and taking walks and watching horses run and cuddling with my animals and just all of it; I never want to leave. I want to live forever.

But I can’t. So what to do? How to make the most of the time I’m given? An amount of time I have little control over, no matter how healthy I eat or safely I drive. Well, I have some ideas, things I’ve been mulling over for the past year of my backwards-death-count down habit. The one I will share here and now is this: better tending to the present. Specifically, take better care of my space, my home, putting in the time and effort to make it more beautiful and functional instead of wishing it were better or different in ways it simply cannot be.

I bought my house in June of 2020, just before the market went crazy and prices shot up. My realtor told me I’d have to decide quickly, things were shifting. I’d looked at a few houses by this point, the “cooler” ones with more unique architecture on older, prettier streets were also more run-down, would require repairs I didn’t have the money or know-how to fix. This house, my house, seemed pretty sturdy, but it was basic, and on a street of other basic, post-war homes that lacked the tall trees I’d fantasized about, lacked big front porches, elaborate gardens, and homes painted unusual colors. In my fantasies, I think, I’m magically rich, or the streets or houses I cannot afford are magically affordable. But, per my realtors advice, I decided to go for it, thinking this would be a starter home, maybe I’d live in it for five years and then invest in a place more like the ones in my fantasies.

But its been five years—the housing market is even more out of reach for me, and I’ve gone back into teaching, which pays significantly less than the technology sector, where I’d been working when I bought this house. I may well be here for a while, near a noisy corner, on a residential street that people like to drive 50-60 mph down, behind apartment buildings whose parking lots seem to accumulate litter which then blows onto my lawn or into my garden. When I first moved in, I put a lot of time and energy and money into fixing things up, repairing the garden, putting up a fence, re-painting all the rooms, tearing the ugly plastic yellow tile off the kitchen walls. But I ran out of steam. Five years later, the glue from under the wall tiles remains exposed and perhaps even uglier, the garden has grown but remains a little stagnant, my cherry tree is struggling to grow and I’ve been too lazy to dig it up and move it to better soil. I stopped hanging art on the walls because I couldn’t afford to frame it all, and I felt paralyzed by indecision with regards to exactly where or how or what if it looked bad and I had to move it and now I have an ugly hole I have to patch and repaint?

So this year—my sixth year in this house, my 41st on Earth, I’m going to remove all the ugly glue from the kitchen walls and properly retile them. I’m going to dig up the cherry tree and replant it somewhere it stands a better chance. I’m going to really tend to the garden, prune all my shrubs, get rid of a few old and haggard ones and plant others. I’m going to do more weeding by hand and put down fresh mulch. I’m going to carefully plant more annual wildflowers in the spring instead of half-assed and halfway through summer. I’m going to go thrifting for more affordable frames to hang more art, and I’ll have to risk screwing up and patching a hole in the wall should I make a bad decision about where to put something. I told Bill all I want for my birthday is help moving our bedroom downstairs so I can move my studio back upstairs, and then I’m going to finally paint those upstairs walls, Steamed Milk, I believe, is the name of the color I selected five years ago, still sitting in a sealed can, waiting to be opened, applied, to warm up and freshen the room it’s destined for.

I’m not sure how to solve the backwards-death-count habit I’ve gotten into, but I’m fairly certain that doing a better job of grounding myself in the present will help. There is so much good around me, in my life. It may not look like my lavish fantasies, but I’m beginning to realize the fantasies are the problem, and not the imperfect, basic house, or the imperfect job, or the reality that I do have to work very hard for a living, instead of income magically filling my bank account while I write and paint all day and tend to nothing dull or undesirable. I do not know where I got such ideas about adulthood, but I’m glad that, at forty-effing-one, I’m finally learning to shed them.

xoxo, KD