and then you saw miracles.

Then autumn fell across the lawn in long shadows and swift evenings and the air stung when you ran hard. Night got longer which meant you could play flashlight tag earlier, and feel older and braver, outside in the dark, crawling from one hiding spot to another. There was the smoke of wood-stoves in the air as all the sounds became clearer, carried across the cold earth more directly.

One night you pushed all the way to the back of the yard, into the empty field beyond the stone wall, and you watched from behind a tree as your sister looked for you in the little ring of light around the back of the house—she was afraid to go farther—and the neighbors called your name, and you won the game; you won it, you won it, you won it.

The shifting of seasons cut suddenly along the edges of every image in your world, drawing out the details, and as all the colors sharpened you knew exactly where you were: in the dark and unafraid.

And then maybe one night you pushed too far, past everything you knew, and the whole world lurched beneath your feet; the ground buckled beneath you. You were horrified—watching each hold loosen, each rung break, feeling physically the sickening drop. There was no sense of direction, where the house lights didn't reach. There was no assurance, where no one called your name.

Don't become too afraid.

But, she said, one day you'll wake up and this doubt will have loosened its grip. One day the serpents will unknot and slip traceless from your stomach. One morning you'll feel as if a whole layer of self has evaporated, disappeared; but the parts that hurt won't exist anymore.

She said, you don't know, you don't, how the world will settle after it shifts or when it does what the contours of the road will be. You have to be generous to everyone and hold onto your faith. God's will, she said, is a lot more resilient than your whims or your ideas. Your volatile passions are likely to break upon him, but afterward, anything that remains will be better for the breaking.

Remember what it was like when you believed that God wanted to speak to you?--that he'd formed the hungry part of you to be appeased only by himself? Remember the fear and the ache of substitution, of rationalization, of turning away?--all the times you knew that he was calling to you and yet you lied to yourself and to others?

Remember when you believed?--there was a significance then to everything, to each blade of grass around the periphery of your path, to each barrier raised in the midst of it.

Remember when you realized that dreaming wasn't enough and you began to mime along with the motions of your dream?

And then you saw miracles.

---
I wrote this the autumn of 2006, just after graduation. I just found it on my computer today.

Turdus migratorius

I would like to take a class on North American birds and their calls. Or better, I would like to walk through the woods with someone who could tell me which call belongs to which bird.

Windows down, I am driving to work on the road I always take—the one that begins with sagging cream-colored colonial and a yard of lilacs and ends with an angular stone wall that bars legions of pine trees, erect and uncounted, from overtaking the road.

Straining my ears, I am dragging this car—this weighty noisy thing that attaches at my hips and keeps me from the fresh air and sunlight—and wishing that I was walking.

I have heard these birds my whole life, recognizing no calls save the cardinal and the mourning dove, both of which I learned before my fifth birthday.

The grey doves roosted beneath the eves of a tool shed at my apartment when I was small, their low cries in the hedges and along the swamp came sometimes later in the day and I asked my mother why they were called “morning doves.”

A cardinal couple nested in the evergreen by my window. We watched as they threaded yarn from my brother’s hat into the nest, bright blue mingling with clay and twigs, and the patient mother waiting for her chicks, spring time and hatching, summer and flight. After they left in the autumn, we gently pried the nest out the branches and studied it.

My grandfather fills his bird bath and watches the birds, still. He would tell me who the calls belong to and then maybe the hedges and the oaks and laurels would belong to me, actually.

Wendell Berry conjectures that you only truly possess the land through an intimate knowledge of its names. When a tree becomes more than a pine tree and is a hemlock. When a bird song becomes the call of an oriel.

We possess the land through words, Berry says, and maybe my grandfather was trying to pass that possession on, those mornings when we were small, sitting on the back porch of the Cape Cod house and learning Latin names.

Turdus migratorius, was the Robin Redbreast that we saw so diligently yanking up worms. Deciduous trees were maples and oaks and any others that lost all their leaves in the winter.

My grandfather lives on the same property where he was raised. He knows where the flying squirrel hides and what time of year the crows start crying at an ungodly hour of the morning.

I want to know the name of every plant in my backyard. This is mostly because I am reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek but also because of my grandfather, I think. I want to name, and thus possess, every uncurling fern, every bluet blossom, every soft mushroom appearing on rotten wood—not just the common names but the proper ones.

And I want to know which bird is singing, even if I can only hear it through my unrolled windows when I drive to work.

1.2.3.4.

attleborough station, south station, silver line, boston international airport--one year ago--when you came home.