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White-flowering dogwood tree

Carolina Wrench

By Caitlin Rae Taylor

The Carolina wren nest in my window feels like a small miracle. It’s been a jumpstart to my heart after years in isolation.

 
Twenty-four hours before we find the nest, my fiancé John and I begrudgingly decide that it’s time to mow our lawn. The plush, green ryegrass and starry carpetweed are now, just a few paltry weeks into spring, up to our knees. Neglected tumors of pine straw have begun to compost into soil on our driveway, and the thin, delicate legs of cellar spiders twitch in the dusty corners of our carport, waiting for an opportune moment when they may steal inside our house and make their home in our shower. We aren’t lawn care people. Long-time renters, we find the idea that we’re responsible for the lawn care of a house we don’t own annoying. This could be because we’re principled, conscientious objectors in a police state, or it could just be because we’re lazy.

Our house, a tiny brick ranch built back in the 60s, came surrounded by towering trees and overgrown thickets of bushes and weeds, and we are most often inclined to leave it this way. Though we live in Alabama now, we count home as Wilmington, North Carolina, a town on the front lines of the climate disaster. Most everyone we know there recycles. Many compost. We know those who volunteer for the Cape Fear River Watch and attend city council meetings to combat the local government’s propensity to give in to developers who have little to no regard for the city’s housing crisis and damage caused by increasingly catastrophic hurricanes. Still, there is no collective consciousness toward conservation there, especially not on the corporate or governmental levels. Similarly, our plush Alabama suburb is clipped and manicured. Overflowing with HOAs and the collective sense that a good lawn is a cropped, weed-free lawn.

We understand only a fraction of the climate crisis, my fiancé and I. We know the opinions we should have. We pay attention when the sharp and abrupt temperature changes where we now live in Tornado Alley set off the town’s emergency siren. We know that the American lawn is an environmental blight and are reminded of this when we walk past the occasional beautiful houses of our wealthier neighbors. Where the gleaming, unstained white brick and the folksy cedar shutters of their abode contrast with the brittle gold of their dead lawn, which they have poisoned so that they might redo this outdoor carpet.

We pride ourselves on being different. We desire to belong to the meadowscaping movement. We let the woody tendrils of young saplings thrive in the gaps of our backyard fence. Our azalea bushes are untrimmed behemoths, their many blossoms attracting a boozy trickle of fuzzy bumblebees. The stumps in our front yard play host to chittering families of twitchy chipmunks. And squirrels find their homes in our treetops and, occasionally, our car engines.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the main motivating factor behind our disregard for the American tradition of lawn care is sloth. Both youngest siblings, the babies of our families, our penchant for avoiding physical labor has only been exacerbated by two and a half years of pandemic living.

But we can’t ignore the havoc that unchecked nature has had on our house. Vines have grown up the sides of our rental’s exterior walls, making a tangle of themselves in our windows. Squirrels romp freely in our backyard, terrorizing our hound dog, whose warm-weather-induced habit of digging holes is instigated by the chipmunks that dive into their underground homes.

So we arm ourselves with metal rake and electric lawnmower (batteries charged), hedge clippers and push broom, and we waste a beautiful Saturday battling the elements. We focus on taming the front yard, even though it is the least of our troubles, because the front yard is the yard that everyone can see. Taming it will do little else but stop the neighbors from letting their dogs poop by our mailbox because they know the mess will no longer be concealed by towers of sowthistle.

Would we embrace the chaos of encroaching nature if we still lived in Wilmington? In North Carolina? It’s difficult to know. We are different people now. Homesick people. More guarded, less financially stable. Isolated by both circumstance and stubbornness. All I know is that when I back out of our driveway to go to work in the morning, I smile at our well-trimmed lawn. We’re making it work, we’ve tamed the beast. But, at the same time, I am unsettled by how pleased I am to no longer lay claim to the most hideous lawn in a neighborhood where, after four years, I still know none of my neighbors. I don’t care to impress any of them—knowing them, caring about their opinions, means I have accepted that Alabama is my landing place.

Our windows are plagued with creatures most people find less than desirable.

I notice the nest in the kitchen window above the sink while I am cooking one of the cheap and comforting dinners that has become a staple in our household since inflation made our lives of culinary adventure untenable: egg drop soup. We dress it up with chicken thigh meat and golden sesame oil, a scattering of chopped scallions to convince ourselves we have met our vegetable requirement. John works later into the night in our back office, his company now permanently remote, and I hear his desperate pleas to the woman on the other end of his headset who is, more than likely, calling him a “fucking disappointment.”

I crack a fourth egg into my measuring cup, throw the shells in the garbage, and pad over to the record player in our living room to turn up the volume on the First Aid Kit album I’m listening to in the hopes of drowning out the daily verbal abuse pelted at the man I love. The man who sometimes emerges from his office at 8 p.m. after an eight-hour shift, trying to hide the salty tear tracks on his stubbled cheeks. After two years of him working remotely, I’ve heard enough.

The record also needs flipping, and in the brief moments between removing and replacing the needle, when there is a pause from the back office as John transitions between customers, I hear a persistent tapping coming from the window above the kitchen sink.

Our windows are plagued with creatures most people find less than desirable. Brown widows sew themselves into triangular pockets of web in our front windowsills. Wasps congregate together in the hanging lip of our dining room window, spitting themselves a place to raise their angry young. The kitchen window is much harder for fauna to access. Only the bottom half of the window is double-paned, the top half single, the space between filled with a tangle of unrecognizable creeping vine that snakes its green body up and down into the crevice created by the window’s curious structure.

Somehow, though, a pair of industrious birds have, without our notice, constructed a tight, tunneled nest of pine straw, hair, and leaves in the small space between the double-paned bottom half of the window. These nests are common for our yard, and we’ve even found abandoned versions in our outdoor mudroom, usually hidden within the bundle of plastic grocery bags hanging on the hook beside our laundry room. When we first found one such nest, John, in all his gentleness, declared that we could not and should not get rid of it before the bird could lay her eggs.

“Look at this thing,” he had marveled at its tunneled structure. “She did such a good job on it!” God bless him.

While I whisk the eggs in preparation for their slow stream into hot chicken broth, I watch the bird who has somehow managed to figure out the window’s maze in order to protect her future children from the nefarious nest-stealing practices of the brown-headed cowbird. She is chestnut brown and skinny with variegated tail feathers and the almost unmistakable white head stripes of the Carolina wren. In her delicate beak she holds what appears to be a seed of some sort. She is perched on the lip of the window, having made her way through the vine’s confusing tangle, twitching her head in a jerky circle as she tries, for what must be the hundredth time, to track her descent between the open double-panes of the window she has chosen as her home. I pause, fork in hand, eggs only half-whisked, as Sweet Caroline—which I have just decided is her name—rears back and smashes her beak into the window as she tries to fit her body between the two panes. She’s made no headway but has managed to keep the seed balanced in her beak. She hops to the left and tries again. Tink! She is unsuccessful.

I wish I could help her, but my landlord long ago painted all the windows of my house shut. Outside, the window is yards above the ground, accessible only by a ladder which we do not own. And even if I could help her in her attempts to live somewhere so precarious, I’m unsure how to intervene in a bird’s life in an unharmful way. So for the better part of ten minutes, while neglecting the bubbling egg drop soup, I watch Sweet Caroline attempt a complicated dance she has forgotten and remembered countless times while I have cooked who knows how many dinners mere inches away. As I watch, I wonder at this little marvel. How was it that she found this perfect alcove? This sweet fortress for her eggs that even she, sometimes, cannot seem to penetrate.

His siblings had grown discontented at the idea that John, the sibling who visited and cared for his mother most often, was no longer nearby in her greatest time of need.

It’s been almost two years since John’s mother died. She was young. Barely 70, a spitfire. Though I’d only met Garde Parson a handful of times, she reminded me of my late grandmother, Ruth Taylor. Loud. Prone to laughter, salacious gossip, and ridiculous television. Where Ruthie had Judge Judy, Garde had Dance Moms. By the time of Garde’s death, I’d begun to find their similar personalities uncanny, but I had to remind myself that I hadn’t known Ruthie since she’d died when I was 15. Who am I to compare two women I barely knew in adulthood? Perhaps it is death that’s linked these women in my mind.

At the height of lockdown, John and I spent large chunks of time in our home state of North Carolina, working remotely as we soldiered through the summer heat and the dark, uncertain weeks of Garde’s hospitalization. We’d already spent a week, earlier in late spring, at John’s brother’s, Aidan’s, house after Garde was admitted for pneumonia. We were collectively—me, John, Aidan, and their sister, Taylor—stumped as to how Garde could have contracted pneumonia when she’d spent the better part of the year confined to her house. She had been, like most of us, in a bad mental state. Amplified by her lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder and the isolation of living alone during a pandemic, two of her children scattered across the state, and one having left NC altogether.

When we returned to Alabama—an arduous eight-hour drive through the worst parts of Atlanta traffic and endless construction on I-85— under the impression that Garde was on the mend, phone calls with John became clipped and judgmental. He had left her. He wasn’t there for her when she needed him. His siblings had grown discontented at the idea that John, the sibling who visited and cared for his mother most often, was no longer nearby in her greatest time of need. These are the commonplace struggles. They in no way have unsewn the seams of the family dynamic, but the tension of the past lingers. Like the tension of Garde’s unmedicated past, which has left, through no fault of her own, certain scars on her children’s hearts.

Still, we thought we had time. Garde’s compact body had and continued to weather some pretty frightening ailments throughout her life so successfully we were tempted to believe she was, somehow, still the picture of health. Lupus, Sjogren’s syndrome, congestive heart failure.

I didn’t know, at the time, that I would marry her son. All the signs in my life and choice of partner had assured me that marriage was an institution into which I would not enter. With two, twice-divorced parents, he’d grown up with no models for a successful marriage, and for years he’d been adamant that ours would be a relationship free of marriage licenses. I was still getting used to the idea of a lifelong commitment without marriage’s legal binds. But I felt connected to Garde nonetheless. It was easy to see where John had learned his humor, his love of theater, his sweet nature. Garde was an open heart, quick to laughter and understanding. I hoped to form a relationship with the woman who had successfully raised a caring, open-minded man who joined me when I broke out into song during conversation instead of trying to quiet me. A man who held my hand at protests instead of convincing me that staying home would be safer. But I would not, as it turned out, get that chance.

The blade of the mower sliced through its own cord, desperate to be free of its nightmarish task. I couldn’t blame it.

I was similarly lazy with the lawn I kept in graduate school. A different climate, a different part of the country, my house in Wilmington was plagued by different creatures. Click beetles who undulated on our kitchen floor, clicking like a metronome into the night to right themselves. Sand fleas carried on the backs of the feral cats that stalked our open yard. Bright green anoles with their hot pink dewlaps pressed against the condensation of our windows during the height of summer. Back then, I lived with three men, a much less sexy and warm-hearted experience than the show New Girl would have me believe. I assumed lawn maintenance would not be one of my household duties, living as I did with three men who had surely grown up with the heteronormative practice of learning to mow from their strapping, heterosexual fathers.

During this time, I worked as fiction editor for the literary magazine Ecotone, a place-based journal known for its science and nature writing. I was learning more about the climate disaster, no longer cradled in the rural suburbs of Western North Carolina where the most concerning weather events were ice storms that only showed their faces every seven years or so. Suddenly I was confronted with corporate pollution: drinking water from the Cape Fear River, dumping site for GenX—a mysterious and toxic PFAS—by Chemours, a chemical company spun-off from DuPont after it had done the same to the drinking water of people living in West Virginia. “The EPA’s toxicity assessment details a number of health effects animals experienced after too much GenX consumption. The chemical reportedly caused problems for the liver, kidneys, immune system, and development of offspring. The EPA also noted an association with cancer,” notes WECT.com. Chemicals became the enemy.

About two years into my new environmental education, I weathered Hurricane Matthew without evacuating the area, and watched, just three months after my move to Alabama, as Hurricane Florence ravaged the town I had come to love.

Amidst all this chaos, poisoning my lawn with weed-killing chemicals was not an option I found appealing. My Wilmington lawn was much more sprawling than my Alabama lawn, with just as much towering and bushy foliage. My roommates were as focused as I was on their writing, their schoolwork, their nights of getting pointlessly drunk in bars to bemoan their inability to get published. This, coupled with (at least) my rising awareness of the American lawn as a blight, led to my very first unintentional meadow lawn, full of plants arbitrarily deemed as weeds, covered in rotting leaf litter in the fall.

My mother would visit and lovingly scold me for my house’s lack of curb appeal. This was another rented property where I and the people whom I lived with had to take lawn maintenance into our own hands despite a lack of know-how. Our landlord, a writer who lived in France, sometimes Spain, sometimes Italy, had provided us with an electric lawnmower. Not the kind with large, chargeable batteries, but the kind with a half-mile-long chord to be plugged into an external outlet.

And so my first battle with an overgrown lawn took place with my mother in the background, watching her newly independent 24-year-old daughter struggle with a narrow, out-of-date, eco-mower, its sad engine wailing as it attempted to take down colonies of towering ragweed. Only five minutes into my first mowing experience did I zig when I should have zagged. And the blade of the mower sliced through its own cord, desperate to be free of its nightmarish task. I couldn’t blame it.

Though our neglect kept our front and back lawns a wilderness, we had no nesting birds to speak of in the Wilmington house. We did, however, have a flea-ridden cat who lived on our outdoor trash can and who, despite the protests of my roommates, I named Earl, plus a rather curvaceous possum who bedded down in the wall between my room and the downstairs bathroom.

Carolina wren
Carolina wren.
Photo by George, courtesy Pixabay.
Carolina wrens often mate for life. This isn’t odd for birds. Roughly 90 percent of bird species do, practicing at least social monogamy, if not sexual monogamy. The social dynamics of birds are complicated, and I hesitate to make any blanket statements, as the social dynamics of human romance are just as puzzling.

When I moved to Alabama for my job in 2018—the only job that would have me after I graduated from my master’s program—John stayed behind in Wilmington, having just signed a new lease, with the understanding that he would follow me in a year. At the time I wasn’t sure if this man, who had told me on multiple occasions that he did not ever see himself getting married, would make good on his promise. His parents, both twice divorced, had never really gotten along. In contrast, my parents were (and are) still together. Best friends. True partners. Mated for life. It had never seemed unreasonable to me that I would have the same arrangement. Until I met John, whose idea of committed love did not include legally binding documents. It did not include Valentine’s Day celebrations. And it certainly did not include the expectation that he, a man, be the exclusive mower of our lawn (though many of these things have changed, this has not).

During the summer of Garde’s death, so soon after John defied my expectations and hauled all his belongings across three states to be with me, the two of us experienced a kind of devastating bonding. We were deep in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic’s most uncertain time: the summer of 2020. We were still wiping down all the boxes and bottles and bags from the grocery store with Clorox wipes, our hands cracked and dry. We were still getting most of our groceries delivered when we could afford it. Neither of us had really seen our families in person for seven months.

After all this isolation, suddenly, we were lodging with John’s brother, his roommate, and their two dogs, endlessly exposed to the very loose bubble they inhabited as friends came and went through the front door. Many of these friendly people were well-wishers who wanted to bring food or money or just their presence to help ease the grief of what was happening. I wish I had been more forgiving then. A little more open to human contact. But every time a new stranger knocked, terrified of contracting COVID-19, I covered my face, washed my hands, and bolted upstairs to the guest room where I refused to emerge until the house was cleared. When John visited Garde in the days leading up to her death, I was barred from the hospital, sitting in my car in the parking lot for two hours while John gave her what I was certain were his goodbyes.

I tried, after Garde finally passed, to sit masked in a living room full of these friends. Beers were passed, and I refused, unwilling to remove my mask. People drank and ate and laughed. I did not participate. I sat, terrified, my heart pounding, until I could take the exposure no longer. I excused myself without a word. Ran to the guest room. Covered my body in blankets. And screamed into a pillow until I was also weeping.

I cried a lot during 2020 and the early days of 2021—about the pandemic, the January 6 fiasco, rampant police violence. It was all wreckage, but this was so close, almost inside of me. I cried for Garde. I cried for John. I cried for myself, for all the people downstairs passing possible COVID-19 germs between them. I even cried for North Carolina, feeling the loss of my home more deeply than ever now that I was there. I cried for my parents, who I realized, terrifyingly, would die. That formless, far-off fear now so close I could touch its outline.

After that, John and I cried in each other’s arms quite a bit. In our guest bed, on his brother’s couch, in the car on the way to my parents’ house. On one such drive from John’s brother’s house to my parents’, just to have some time to decompress, we remarked on the greenery of North Carolina, trees and creeping kudzu whipping by out the car windows.

Over the years since we left NC, we’ve come to consider the green of North Carolina flora superior to that of Alabama. Maybe we’re biased—Alabama is certainly one of the greenest, wildest places I’ve ever lived. But the foliage in North Carolina is brighter, somehow. Neon, almost, in areas. We assured one another, as we still do, that no—we aren’t biased or imagining things—the green really is so much greener, and why have we never appreciated it? Why did it take losing such a color for us to long for it?

But by the time of Garde’s death, this was an old conversation, and so we move on to one of the pressing tasks at hand: what to do with all the trappings that Garde left behind.

“There’s a ring,” John said, eyes on the road. “There are three diamonds in it. She’s leaving us a diamond each—one for Taylor, one for Aidan, and one for me.”

“That’s nice that she thought to leave you each a piece of it,” I said. I was rooting through a plastic bag full of road snacks, trying to decide whether to eat the cheese first or the hot pickles.

“Aidan is going to get his stone and the emerald ring she left him appraised.”

“That’s a smart idea,” I said. “We could do something similar if you want. Then, when we know how much it’s worth, you can decide if you want to sell it. Or make it back into a ring or a necklace or something. Whatever you want.”

“I was thinking we could make it back into a ring,” he said.

“Sure, we could do that.”

“I was thinking you could wear it.”

As far as marriage proposals go, it wasn’t the most obvious. It took me a full day to realize I’d been proposed to at all. Mostly because I didn’t expect to be proposed to, but also because the timing was so odd, our hearts full of homesickness and grief. I wondered, not that silently, if John’s grief at losing his mother had caused him to make a rash decision—to create a tether to replace the one he’d just lost.

“No,” he reassured me. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while. And when I went to see my mom in the hospital… I told her I was going to marry you.”

I hope that we, too, will be mated for life.

With their first president as inspiration, lawns became a status symbol, first existing only for the rich who could afford the time and money it took to curate them.

The history of the American lawn sees its roots in—what else—colonization. Land which, through genocide, would eventually become the United States had been carefully transformed by Indigenous stewardship, something European invaders did not understand as they described the New World as an “untouched wilderness.” This “wilderness” was actually a transformed landscape, altered to better aid indigenous hunting and fishing. Desiring more familiar terrain, colonists destroyed the native, annual grasses through animal husbandry, replacing them (both intentionally and unintentionally) with European grasses like Kentucky bluegrass and common weed varieties like clover, plantain, and dandelion. These last three are some of the most common weeds homeowners seek to rid their lawns of.

Front lawns developed through wealthy colonizers’ desires to emulate English garden designs in their American homes. In a new nation hungry to both match the power and grandeur of its English mother while also distinguishing itself from her, Jefferson’s Monticello and Washington’s Mount Vernon served as the models for what a wealthy American home should look like. With their first president as inspiration, lawns became a status symbol, first existing only for the rich who could afford the time and money it took to curate them. Though lawn care eventually trickled down to the middle class, a status symbol they remain.

Is it any wonder that I’m not a fan? Lawns are an environmental disaster. They discourage ecological diversity, encourage the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. According to Scientific American, “lawns require the equivalent of 200 gallons of drinking water per person per day.” The publication also cites American lawns as our most grown crop, useful for nothing. This kind of boastful excess feels uniquely American, uniquely United Statesian. I work on a college campus, its green spaces so demanding that rarely a day goes by when I don’t see maintenance workers weeding or watering or leaf blowing or, in some cases, ripping up entire flowering bushes to be replaced by other flowering bushes.

The expectation of the American lawn is dizzying and exhausting to me, perplexing, like many expectations of American society. The Carolina wren nest in my window feels like a small miracle. It’s been a jumpstart to my heart after years in isolation. Years of keeping my head down and losing myself in hours of bad television, just to keep my spirit treading water during personal disaster after national disaster after global disaster.

After the death of John’s mother, all of her children were visited by different kinds of moths. Not the small, dizzying moths who tumble indoors, trying to make their way from porch lights to living room lamps. No—a giant luna moth visited John’s sister quite soon after Garde’s passing. For weeks after we returned to Alabama, a remarkably large orange-tipped oakworm moth camped out on the cool brick right beside our front door. It was there, without fail, all through the day and night, its plush mane cozily snuggled into its folded reddish orange wings.

The birds in our window feel reminiscent of this time. Like Garde bringing a piece of nature, a scrap of life, back to us. To remind us she is still out there, somewhere, in the ether. And if John and I were meticulous American lawn owners, we might not be touched by this life cycle. Sweet Caroline could have taken one look at our placid, uniform patch of poisoned grass and flown the other way.

If these birds can thrive in this maze of a manmade window where they do not naturally belong, surely I can make a go of things in Alabama.

I am not a person who believes in signs. But it’s been difficult not to project my situation onto these birds.

Two nights before it happens, I see the babies for the first time. We’ve heard their cries as Sweet Caroline and her partner have flown off and returned to stuff their greedy, open beaks with food. The journey is ceaseless—fly off find food fly back feed babies fly off find food fly back feed babies fly off find food fly back feed babies.

I think, briefly, about this little family’s triumph. If these birds can thrive in this maze of a manmade window where they do not naturally belong, surely I can make a go of things in Alabama. I can mow my lawn and trim my hedges, make friends with people whose lives look nothing like mine, travel ceaseless distances to be with those to whom I am closest. I can run this race for years yet, for, at 30, I’m relatively young and healthy, and there’s time to grow and change and move on.

The babies are small tufts of down. Mere puffs inset with fresh eyes and pale new beaks. I see them as I wash the dishes, and I worry the light of the kitchen confuses them during the night. One of the babies seems unbothered, hopping around from one end of the window’s corridor to the other. The other stands on the lip of the wooden window frame. It faces me. Its head twitches, as if it’s inspecting my kitchen, perhaps trying to understand where the daylight is coming from. A new fear rises up inside me. What if they can never get out? What if, in trying her best to protect their futures, Sweet Caroline has indeed chosen a home where her babies can never thrive? In order to thrive, they must leave this peculiar corridor, which is all they know of this life. As if it can read minds, the curious chick flaps its wings experimentally. After several tries, it succeeds in making it up to the next part of the frame. There’s one more leap until it reaches the lip of the opening, the one that leads out into the backyard, to freedom.

“That’s it,” I say under my breath, dirty dishes forgotten in the sink. “Just do the exact same thing again.”

But the babe can’t make the leap. Each time, it flutters back down to the nest in defeat. Sweet Caroline comes and goes infrequently. I don’t know what she’s supposed to be teaching the children. I can’t imagine that window hopping is in her DNA. She has figured it out after ages of trial and error, after careful study and several failed attempts. But she was already an expert flyer by that time, something these chicks are not. She watches as her babies try to understand the world inside this bubble she’s raised them in. How to understand it, how to thrive in it, how to escape it.

I don’t finish the dishes. I set a plate covered in black bean sauce back into a sink full of soapy water and walk away from this painful scene. The chicks chirp pleadingly into the night.

I’m at work when my fiancé texts a few days later: “Honey. One of the birds died. I’m not sure how but it’s in there and isn’t moving…”

“That’s what I was afraid of. God damn it.”

Sweet Caroline, her partner, and one of her children have made it out alive. I imagine them out in the world, parents teaching their surviving child how to continue subsisting. This is where the good worms are. This is the tree with the best seeds. These are the neighborhood dogs to steer clear of. There will be new dangers for this little bird, and it’s ridiculous for me to think that it means anything.

I’m not there when John pries open the window, breaking through the thick layer of paint that we assumed would make such a feat impossible. I’m not there when flies flood our kitchen. Or when the man I love scoops the gentle whisper of a body into his hands and carries it outside.

I return from work to a ruined nest. Pine needles and hair and string and leaves scattered about the window, strands of this abandoned home lying unseen on our kitchen counter. I am filled with a sadness I cannot pin down. This death feels like a failure on my part, as has my inability to feel settled in Alabama. Which bird are we? Is Alabama the window or is that North Carolina? Am I staying in a place where I feel penned up because the thought of venturing out and relearning how to live fills me with fear and dread? Or am I staying because, for all my efforts, I cannot move on? Or is this entire line of questioning false? I have a habit of telling friends who seek my counsel that there are no right or wrong choices in life. There are only the choices we make. I don’t believe there’s a path laid out for us by some omnipotent creator. But then, if there’s not, if the choices I’ve made thus far in my life to get to where I am ultimately mean nothing at all, then is there any point in making choices to begin with? Alabama is where I find myself, just as these birds broke through their shells and found themselves inside a window. Will accepting this fate make me the bird who survived? Or the bird who did not?

Maybe she was not a beacon, Sweet Caroline. Not a path back to the place that made me.

I don’t have any answers, and I haven’t for years. But for the first time in a long time, I am actually looking at the natural spaces that surround my house, rather than ignoring them. I have yet to embrace my life in Alabama, but perhaps this is some kind of step forward. I am used to looking beyond my current station. For whatever is better. Whatever is new. Whatever is next. But death has a way of slowing down ambition. Bringing progress for the sake of progress to a halt. I have lost my home. John has lost one of his strongest and most emotional links to the place from which we come. And this loss only makes me think of the losses to come. Of my own mother, on the brink of 60 and battling psoriatic arthritis, osteopenia, nerve damage. And so instead of looking ahead, I have begun to look backward. At what I loved in my old life. Everything makes me think of North Carolina.

At the farthest edge of my front lawn, hidden behind unchecked tree growth and the strangling grip of confederate jasmine, a white dogwood tree flowers this spring. Did it grow during my quarantine depression? Has it always been there? How have I missed its distinctive petals? The state tree of North Carolina calls to me from my own front yard. It makes me think of mother’s, my own. My fiancé’s, my soon-to-be husband’s. It makes me remember the church I grew up in, its grounds showered in pink and white petals.

The Carolina wren is not the state bird of North Carolina but of South. Still, I can’t ignore the Carolina in its name. Maybe it nested here because of my overgrown suburban backyard, one of the wrens’ choice nesting habitats.

Again, I’m not a person who believes in signs, and so this explanation is most attractive to my realist mind. Maybe she was not a beacon, Sweet Caroline. Not a path back to the place that made me. Not a portent, warning me of my fate if I stay in Alabama. Maybe she was just a mother. Trying her best to make a home.

 

 

Caitlin Rae TaylorCaitlin Rae Taylor is a writer, editor, and designer based in North Carolina. She earned her MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington where she served as the fiction editor for Ecotone and the publishing assistant for Lookout Books. She has worked with nonprofit press Milkweed Editions and as editor of Southern Humanities Review. She is currently the art director/designer for Press Pause Press. Her fiction, book reviews, and interviews can be found or are forthcoming in the Greensboro ReviewCRAFT LiteraryCotton Xenomorph, PacificaAdroitHaveHasHadMoon City Review, the Alabama Writers Forum, Southern Humanities Review online, and Germ Magazine.

Header photo of dogwood in bloom by Michele Korfhage, courtesy Shutterstock.