High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [15]
Meanwhile, in the cloistered territory of the courtyard, so many things come and go it would feel absurd to call it mine: I’ve seen an elf owl picking through the compost pile; Gila woodpeckers fighting over the tree trunks; hummingbirds at the flowers; doves who nested in the grape arbor; a roadrunner who chased off the doves and gulped down their eggs; a pair of cardinals and a Pyrrhuloxia couple who nested in adjacent trees and became so confused, when the young fledged and flew to the ground, that they hopped around frantically for a week feeding each other’s kids. A pair of Swainson’s thrushes stopped in for a day on their migratory flight from Canada to Peru; to them, this small lush square in a desert state must have appeared as Moses’ freshet from the rock.
The cardinals, of course, eat the grapes. In some years the finches peck a hole in every single apricot before I get around to throwing a net over the tree. A fat, clairvoyant rock squirrel scales the wall and grabs just about every third tomato, on the morning I decide that tomorrow it will be ripe enough to pick.
So what, they all declare with glittering eyes. This is their party, and I wasn’t exactly invited.
IN CASE YOU EVER WANT TO GO HOME AGAIN
I have been gone from Kentucky a long time. Twenty years have done to my hill accent what the washing machine does to my jeans: taken out the color and starch, so gradually that I never marked the loss. Something like that has happened to my memories, too, particularly of the places and people I can’t go back and visit because they are gone. The ancient brick building that was my grade school, for example, and both my grandfathers. They’re snapshots of memory for me now, of equivocal focus, loaded with emotion, undisturbed by anyone else’s idea of the truth. The schoolhouse’s plaster ceilings are charted with craters like maps of the moon and likely to crash down without warning. The windows are watery, bubbly glass reinforced with chicken wire. The weary wooden staircases, worn shiny smooth in a path up their middles, wind up to an unknown place overhead where the heavy-footed eighth graders changing classes were called “the mules” by my first-grade teacher, and believing her, I pictured their sharp hooves on the linoleum.
My Grandfather Henry I remember in his sleeveless undershirt, home after a day’s hard work on the farm at Fox Creek. His hide is tough and burnished wherever it has met the world—hands, face, forearms—but vulnerably white at the shoulders and throat. He is snapping his false teeth in and out of place, to provoke his grandchildren to hysterics.
As far as I know, no such snapshots exist in the authentic world. The citizens of my hometown ripped down the old school and quickly put to rest its picturesque decay. My grandfather always cemented his teeth in his head, and put on good clothes, before submitting himself to photography. Who wouldn’t? When a camera takes aim at my daughter, I reach out and scrape the peanut butter off her chin. “I can’t help it,” I tell her, “it’s one of those mother things.” It’s more than that. It’s human, to want the world to see us as we think we ought to be seen.
You can fool history sometimes, but you can’t fool the memory of your intimates. And thank heavens, because in the broad valley between real life and propriety whole herds of important truths can steal away into the underbrush. I hold that valley to be my home territory as a writer. Little girls wear food on their chins, school days are lit by ghostlight, and respectable men wear their undershirts at home. Sometimes there are fits of laughter and sometimes there is despair, and neither one looks a thing like its formal portrait.
For many, many years I wrote my stories