Birds

This morning I'm listening to all the birds that have suddenly come back to Corpus and thinking about my grandmother. The past couple of days have started and ended in thick skeins of fog and it seems like all the birds snuck in on their migratory paths when the world couldn't see them coming. I'm wondering where they've been-- Mexico? South America?-- and what other lives they've watched over while they were gone from mine. This morning they're bobbing like heavy fruit from the skinny branches of the crepe myrtle outside my window and gabbling to each other with the excitement and energy of old neighbors back from exotic vacations. Probably trying to outdo each other-- "Oh it was great! We saw some Aztec ruins and spent a little time in Rio. Very noisy, but God it was beautiful!"

I'm thinking about birds because my grandmother's heart is failing. Huge migratory journeys are on my mind because today I feel like I can understand how the sun and wind and physical memory could guide you across oceans to the same place, season after season. Right now I feel like I could close my eyes and walk the 400 miles to where my mother and grandmother are. There is a cell-level pull working on me, like the pull the moon exerts on the tides. It's not for the purpose of saying goodbye, but for something deeper and more difficult to understand. It's to honor the continuity of the line of mothers from which I've come, a blood migration going back over centuries and whose origins are hidden in fog.

She is more than my grandmother. She is the closest thing I know to a beginning, and all these parts of me I've always taken for granted are now covered in questions. Where did all of these things come from? How did they begin? Who else used my fingertips and eyes and the strength of my arms before I inherited them? How far have all of these things traveled before they ended up here?

In the selfishness of youth and the blindness of individuality, I've always thought that I got wherever I was under my own steam. But today, listening to birds and thinking of my grandmother, I'm realizing how foolish that was. I am only the most recent iteration of a complex and beautiful set of codes that has traveled over decades and oceans, trading hands like a gift. I am pulled today by recognition of this fact, and by the pain of gratitude I've never expressed.