Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

August 25, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

6:07 a.m. 63 degrees, wind SSE 3 mph. Sky: once the ground fog lifts, lightly rubbled, over-exposed blue and white wool with hints of peach in the west. Permanent streams: upper, jittery flow, flickering light, running out of steam; lower, a single worried puddle, symbolic of a parched summer. Wetlands: colors softened by mist; somewhere across the marsh, a tree falls, fracturing the lullaby of the breeze. Pond: sans mist; sans everything except a lone turtle, a black, shiny disc with little webbed feet that rises and sinks, like a puppet on a string. The drone of crickets: an early morning metronome. A chickadee rips breakfast out of a dewy spider web. 

AOR: two hermit thrushes

Tricolored bat (Perimyotis subflavus), a tiny bat, busily erratic: treetop level coursing; over the road; looks like a hummingbird moth. Once known as the eastern pipistrelle, like little brown bats, a victim of white-nosed syndrome. Social-distancing, tricolored bats ignore at their own peril.

Three pewees slurred whistle, a dampened version of plaintive summer song, equally longing, equally sad, simple to mimic. First winter wren I've heard in more than two months; a truncated version of the effervescent piccolo, which, when blended with the drumming of a far-off pileated, ushers me back to earliest May, when the mornings were colder and birdsongs hotter. The fife and drum corps . . . a return (and unexpected) engagement. Catbird meows. Another pulse of red-breasted nuthatches passes through the Hollow, tin horns ringing.

Today's Linny's birthday. She would have been sixty-nine. When she died, I knew what the boys would be missing, what she would be missing. And I mourned a litany of irretrievable losses. I spent very little time considering what I'd lost. A friend, for sure. A companion with whom to explore the recesses of the world, for sure.  

The boys loved to travel. And, for the most part, they were easy to travel with. Very few complaints or outlandish requests. From the time they were infants, Linny and I took them everywhere—they nursed themselves to sleep in tents from Alaska to Newfoundland to the desert Southwest. A hint of campfire smoke lingered on most of their outdoor clothes. When Casey was five, he lured a barred owl to within five feet, hooting softly to the bird from his bicycle. Jordy had never met a snake or a frog he didn't like, and he would broadcast enthusiasm whenever he discovered a strange-looking insect.

Although the boys loved the wonders of nature and appreciated life's grand diversity, for quite a while after their mother died, I hardly took them anywhere. Whenever we traveled as a family, Linny had been the organizer, the program director. She would remember the toys, the books, the snacks, the toenail clippers. I had been the consultant, the mule, the cheerleader. After Linny died, life without a compass seemed best lived closer to home.

Over the years, travel returned to our lives, often with a vengeance. But the sense of loss forever lingers. Yesterday, Becky and Casey texted me the sonogram of a fetal heart-beat. A wanted to see that irrepressible smile—one more time—rise like a tide across Linny's face when she realized that she'd be a grandmother, a role she would have relished.

Three phoebe chicks in the front-yard apple tree, wings drooped and quivering . . . begging, begging, begging. I stop and watch, phoebe destiny: mostly moths, a steady procession, a seasonal harvest. No matter how much I yearn, I can't suppress a smile . . . time has a way of passing . . . of blunting loss and unspooling the future.