When I write about my mother, my pen likes to compare her to birds without my permission. I write her voice like sparrows, high and tittering when she laughs. As an angst-ridden teen, my word of choice for her was ‘crow’, pecking away at me bit by bit. She became a character composed of overused hawk metaphors and some stolen lines of poetry about eagles and eyes that used to make sense but now make me cringe. When she scolds me, she is a flamingo: tall, bright, somehow elegant and yet also maybe – no, definitely – scaring the ever-loving shit out of me. It was not just my mother that fell victim to my bird metaphors. My dad I have always considered an owl, infinitely wise and always waiting up for me to come home when I am out late with friends. My brother has never quite managed to escape the adjective “bird-like” when I write, and I doubt he ever will, not when he’s got long ostrich legs and is constantly making so much damn noise.
There is no question my mother’s favorite family member is the dog, and I cannot even be mad at her for it because without a doubt my favorite family member is the cat. My mother dropped everything when the old girl busted her knee, and she takes time out of her day to always greet Molly even when the retriever has been particularly petulant about doing what she’s told. She patiently lets the lumbering mess follow her around the house, even when the smell of methane gas from the toxic dog farts fills her office, or when Molly falls asleep right behind her desk chair, essentially pinning her in, my mother never makes her move.
The thing I struggled with the most about Molly was how whenever I walked her – admittedly, it was rare that I walked her, but it was for this very reason – she would undoubtedly sit her fat butt down and refuse to move for anything. The Rapture could have begun around us, and Miss Molly Mae would have sat there through it all, eyes squinted in the breeze.It took me years of tugging and shoving her off the ground before I finally had the courtesy to sit down beside her, and only then did I learn that she was not being rude, or stubborn, or even petty, if that was possible. My dog, in her infinite wisdom, was waiting. Waiting for the neighborhood dog to lumber out of the woods to join her, or my cat to catch up from where he’d been slinking along behind us. I never noticed before how, whenever my dog let her eyes fall closed on walks, it was in time with the bird-calls.
The first bird-call I ever learned to whistle was the simple weeeeet, weeeeet, wee-wee-wee-weet of what I always assumed was a robin. When I was little, I associated robins with my mother, partly because of Winnie the Pooh, and partly because every time I stepped outside, I would always see a robin. I have never understood why cardinals were Indiana’s state bird, not when robins are so much easier to find. So much easier, in fact, I remember spending an entire summer watching robins grow from eggs to birds. We had a deck on our back porch, and the underside of our deck housed a little sidewalk where I kept my sandbox, and my parents kept a toolshed. Dangling from the bottom of the deck were three ferns, hung in pots and suspended overhead like we were walking through a jungle. Walking under the ferns after a rainstorm was the closest I’d ever get to the jungle, and the robin’s nest in one of those ferns was my substitute toucan.
Every day, I’d sit on the top half of the deck, face smooshed against the wood and peering down between the panels so I could see the nest and the three baby-blue eggs hidden in the fern. I remember two very distinct emotions: delight that there were going to be three – three! – little baby birds right before my eyes, and outrage when my chubby-cheeked, snot-nosed, toddler of a brother edged me out of the way, so he could get a look.
See, the best and worst part about having a brother is I have two of them. Lucky me, my parents decided the nest was too empty right as I was getting used to being the only bird to get the worm. Now I had to be early. I don’t mind as much anymore, because my brothers may not be able to appreciate writing the same way I do, but I know they would still read this, if I asked. The first brother, all legs and boyish charm, and yet somehow will always, always, be an ostrich metaphor in my mind; and the second brother, who, when I called him to ask what bird he considered himself to be, his exact response was “What’s that bird that invades other birds’ nests and eats their children?” I have concluded he’s a duckling.
Part of me wants to ask my brother if he remembers the robin nest, or if he remembers the time we accidentally murdered hundreds of tiny frogs because we thought throwing them into a lake full of catfish was a good idea, or if he too wakes up every morning to the weeeeet, weeeeet, wee-wee-wee-weet that had very quickly become my favorite sound. The other part of me is scared to ask because I’m worried he won’t remember, and that things as simple as robins’ nests and bird-calls and the accidental execution of amphibians, which are so important to me, are so trivial to others.
It is this same fear that stops me from telling my mother about things like the bird metaphors, and even if I ever let her read this I wonder if she will understand what I mean when I say she’s the only person I have never been able to restrict to just one bird. Enigmatic in the sense that even in my most precise analyses of her, I can never nail down exactly what bird she is, nor would I ever dare to describe her as any type of bird kept in a cage.
On a family trip to Dollywood in Tennessee, I rode a ride called the Mystery Mine with my mother, and that is where I first learned that canaries were often taken into the mines as a type of warning. If the canary stopped singing, it meant there was gas in the mine, and the miners needed to flee. Similarly, if my mother ever went quiet, you knew something far, far worse was coming. Comparisons between my mother and canaries are always restricted to simile, never metaphor, because my mother could never be something as simple as a canary.
I went almost eighteen years of my life without ever once seeing a cardinal. I saw a bald eagle wild in nature twice before I ever once saw Indiana’s supposed state bird. The first time I spotted a bald eagle was on my way to school, my senior year of high school. I was so floored by seeing an actual bald eagle not in captivity that I pulled over, sacrificing a good chunk of my first period study hall just to sit there and stare at this majestic animal that represented a whole nation. Even despite the current state of our nation – it was November of 2016 when I saw this eagle – the bird still had the guts to show its face, and I still hadn’t seen my damn cardinal.
The second time I saw a bald eagle was with my mother. We were in the car, headed back to our house, when an eagle was camped out at the top of one of the trees directly across from our family friend’s house. I will never forget the excitement in my mother’s voice when she proudly declared “That is a bald eagle!” and, seconds later, called the family friend to tell her to get outside and see the eagle before it flew away. While I was busy whistling that same weeeeet, weeeeet, weet-weet-weet-weet trying to get the bird’s attention so I could take a picture, to save the memory selfishly for myself, my mother’s first instinct was to share the experience with someone else.
When she went back to practicing law (she had stopped for a time after I was born), my mother’s empathy for neglected children – baby birds ignored by their mothers – made me think of mourning doves. She would retell her cases tiredly, warbling to the point of clamming up entirely when she became too upset to talk about it anymore. I never pushed, and I tried instead to remind myself about all the times in middle and high school when she used to be a crow in my eyes, she would never, ever, be anything like the vultures she now had to deal with every day.
My brothers have always been better than me at spotting cardinals. Every time they see one and try to point it out to me – “How can you not see it, it’s bright red!” – I can never spot it in time. It always flies away too quickly, eternally just out of view. I wanted to see a cardinal so badly that I cut one out of a magazine and tucked it into a photo frame on my desk, so I could look at it whenever I heard the birds sing.
The first time I was finally, finally, able to see a cardinal clearly, not just a fleeting glimpse as it flew away, or was obstructed by a million leaves, was in my first weeks at college. There was a very large tree behind my dorm, positioned perfectly outside my window. If there was not a screen stopping me, I could reach out and grab the leaves if I wanted to. I had gone for a walk along the paths behind the college. I had not initially planned to go on a long hike, rather my feet decided for me, which is how I ended up on a three-mile hike without so much as a water bottle in the early morning near-heat that would certainly become humid and hazy as the day went on. For now, I didn’t mind. I was encouraged by the overwhelming desire to go somewhere, anywhere, but here, and the wooded path was the closest I could get to my woods back home, the whistle of weeeeet, weeeeet, weet-weet-weet-weet familiar and comforting.
Why had it never once crossed my mind to look up that call to see what bird it was? My youthful assumption that the bird must have been a robin – because what other creature could have made that sound? Certainly not a crow, the only other bird my young mind was familiar with –went unopposed for years of my life, all the way up until this point, when I finally came out of the path at the mouth of the Ohio River and heard it again. Weeeeet, weeeeet, weet-weet-weet-weet.
This time, sitting proudly on a branch near the river, chest puffed, head back, singing his heart out like God Himself had put him there just for me, was a cardinal.
He was handsome, bright red and bold, gorgeous and mighty and he never once stopped singing, not even when I risked a step closer, so I could sit and listen to him properly. Oh, gross injustice! I had spent my life listening to his song, my favorite sound in the world, and never once understood that this beautiful creature I had always revered and admired had really been with me all along. I had been too careless to ever truly stop to listen, too arrogant to understand that I was missing something. I thought I knew enough to see the beauty in the unseen, when truly I knew jack shit. I was ignorant. I had missed out on so many cardinals because I’d been too stupid to listen and to learn, to follow the cardinal’s song all those years ago. I was so moved I almost wept, but even this moment did not come close to the second time I saw a cardinal. This time, he was outside my window, on that tall tree just out of reach, singing loud enough for me to hear him.
The cardinal never left, even when it got cold. He sat on the tree outside my window, and even when he was too busy to visit, he still makes sure to sing for me every now and then, a reminder he’s nearby. Sometimes I’m too busy to visit home as well, but he still sings outside my window; I think of my brothers, and I know there is a cardinal singing to them in our woods back home.
The next time I drive home, my mind is preoccupied with trivial things, things like suitcases and fishbowls and how I’d convince my brothers to help me unload my car while I escorted my new pet fish inside. I was so distracted with these things, I nearly missed him. He was waiting for me expectantly on the mailbox, head cocked to one side as if asking, “Did you learn your lesson?” I didn’t, because I never learn, not at first. Not until he sang did I understand.
His voice was like a sparrow, high and tittering. His beak was hooked like a crow yet would never stoop to harm another being. His eyes were dark and watching – another overused hawk metaphor – and chest puffed out as proudly as an eagle. His bright red feathers flashy, a flamingo, yet he didn’t – definitely, didn’t – scare the ever-loving shit out of me. A bird as common as a robin and yet somehow all these years I’ve wasted thinking this song could belong to something as simple as a robin. Freer than any caged canary could ever hope to be, bolder than even the melancholiest of mourning doves: never sad, always hopeful. All at once, I understood.
My mother was, and always has been, a cardinal.
