Pre-Grief and Sparrows

I'm not a botanist, so I can't tell you what is actually happening inside leaves in August.  I only know what I see.  Over the summer, the richly varying greens of late spring and early summer--each kind of tree with its own take on the colour green, from the grey-green of willow to the lambent green of aspen--homogenize and simply become a darker version of the green you find in your new Crayola box of 9 crayons.  (I'm dating myself.  Are those flat little boxes even available any more?  I think the smallest is 24. But when I was in grade school a new box every September was a treat.) Their leaves sound different. Stiffer. They susurrate rather than taking the breeze in their stride. And I see it in people's gardens, how the early summer perennials look like their tips have been dipped in bronze.  My hydrangeas, no matter how valiantly Bill keeps them watered, give up blooming and their ivory flowers stiffen and infuse with a dusty pink. The tips of the ferns turn crispy.  Even my Lemony Lace Elderberry gives up some of its vibrant young green, as if to say "Green's good.  Any shade." Of course, I notice the shorter days, but only in the evening.  All day my world looks subtly different.  If I could just ignore it for a moment, I might fool myself.  

It's like pre-grief, something I first felt when my parents were in their early nineties and I would visit them at least once a year in Atlanta, Georgia.  Of course I would notice the little changes. How my father talked less, had less to say, how his deafness came between him and the world. The look of incomprehension on his face when he watched the evening news. Or my mother's anxiety, which ran rampant after surgery left my father incontinent. (This was before the surge in "incontinence-wear.") The laundry! The worry about going out for anything, even just ice cream! I went for five or six days to problem solve and to listen.  To hold my mother's hands. To reassure her about her anxiety medication.  To sit next to my dad and just let him wordlessly rest his head on my shoulder. Just as I now spend August picking beans and thinning carrots again, and watching the happy bees, I would simply immerse myself in their world for the days I spent there.

Then I'd drive the terrifying Atlanta expressways the full hour back to the airport, return the rented car, get myself checked in and through security, and sit in the lovely airport atrium with its filtered sunlight, and take out whatever journal I was working on at the time. Then I'd write about what I saw and the sadness it brought with it. I knew I was lucky to have parents in their nineties, but still. Each tiny loss was another step toward their mortality. Pre-grief.

A couple of nights ago, I sat out in our back garden for about an hour.  It was still hot, but August-dry--the kind of weather that comforts rather than stifling you. I just let myself range over the brake of trees on the west side of the yard, letting myself sink into accepting the changes. But it was apparently time for the sparrows to come in for their bedtime snack. Somehow the first half dozen managed to simply drift down to disguise themselves behind a leaf or two.  When I began to notice them, the only sign was a slight branch that was bobbing out of rhythm with leaves caught by the breeze. The light was waning, and yet as I watched I could see that more and more branches had sparrows.  

Somehow my perception of the trees changed. It might have been like the Rubin's vase illusion:  how you can see either the vase or the two faces in profile, but not both at once. I could see the August-green leaves, or I could see branches peopled by sparrows, and my vision would flicker between the two. That flickering was pure magic: the moment when that brake became sparrows trees for a millisecond before trees that hid dozens of sparrows.

Sparrows, as you know, often travel in flocks, and each flock has a couple of personalities who take it upon themselves to warn the rest of the flock of danger. There's always one sparrow with a hair trigger, and a flock of sparrows learns to ignore this little boy who cries "Wolf!" too often. But they have their more reliable watchers. These came down in twos and three to peck at the seeds in the "bird garden"--an area I've planted so that mounds of fallen seed or husks of millet aren't a problem that needs to be relentlessly cleaned up. The ferns and Bishop's Weed are good with birdseed.  A few more would join them. Then half a dozen. Soon I watched at least twenty snacking on millet. But I was getting stiff on the metal bench in the cooling evening, and so I moved slightly. A watcher chirped.  And the wings beating back the air sounded like an archangel leaving my garden.