High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [110]
He did remember, after all, that I was behind him. When he reached the top of the mountain he waited, and we sat down together on a rock, listening to the stillness in the leaves. A song rang out through the branches, and because Steven is an ornithologist, he was able to tell me it was a rose-breasted grosbeak.
It sang again. He listened carefully, and said, “No, that’s a scarlet tanager.”
Either way, I was impressed by his ear for song. I asked him if he was sure. He said, “Yes, absolutely, that’s a scarlet tanager.”
And right then, exactly as he spoke, it came and landed on a branch directly in front of us, and it wasn’t a scarlet tanager, it was a rose-breasted grosbeak.
Steven looked downcast; I shrugged and said, oh, what did it matter anyway. I think we both felt a little dismayed that this bird had come out of the woods to prove him wrong.
And then, directly in front of us, in a blaze of vermilion and perfect vindication, another bird landed—the one that had been singing, after all—and it was a scarlet tanager.
I had no idea this visitation of birds contained our future. Everything: risk, belief, forgiveness, being wrong, being right, finding how precariously similar those things are. And mainly, the whole possibility of bright red, singing marvels. What luck, I remember thinking. Here is a man who listens carefully to every voice.
He also had the patience to feed a wild fox who had whelped her pups in the pokeberry thicket behind the barn. Late that evening I sat on the stone porch steps of his old farmhouse and watched these two, man and fox, in their nightly ritual. He tossed out small scraps of meat, one after another; she approached, showing none of her hand but a pair of fierce green orbs in the dark—and accepted.
Eventually he would show the same patience in seeing me through my own wild fears and doubts, all the foul things my brain can turn over in a restless spell when it scrabbles around and around its cage at night. And so I have molted now, crawled out of my old empty banged-up skin with a fresh new life, and look here, what is this? I have regenerated a marriage, precious as a new eye.
I’m still feeling fairly soft-shelled. I’m too old to look at things the way I used to; too old, in fact, to look at anything closer than my own elbow without twinges of presbyopia (or, as one of my relatives calls it, “that Presbyterian thing”); I expect my next pair of glasses will need the extra window. So if I’m not quite the Bifocal Bride, I’m on the brink. I have a midlife vision of all things, including love and permanence. My dear mate and I will get to watch each other creak into old age and fall into uneasy truces with our own limbs—that’s the best case, presuming we cleave together as we’ve hoped and promised. It’s a wonder anyone does this at all, I think from time to time, as I’m visited by the specter of all I could lose.
When I was pregnant I felt like this too. People will claim that having children is a ticket to immortality, but in fact it merely doubles your stakes in mortality. You labor and you love and there you are, suddenly, with twice as many eyes in your house that could be put out, hearts that could be broken, new lives dearer than your own that could be taken from you. And still we do it, have children, right and left. We love and we lose, get hurled across the universe, put on a new shell, listen to the seasons.
Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It’s the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Creation Stories,” in somewhat different form, was published as the introduction to Southwest Stories, eds. John Miller and Genevieve Morgan. San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1993.
A brief portion of “Making Peace” appeared under that title in Special Report, November 1990.
“In Case You Ever Want to