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Our second April brought with it the welcome warmth of sunshine, the damp-cool smell of turned earth, the urgency of the world coming alive. From my bird’s-eye view, I watch my young self playing with pinecones on the warm stones of the patio, barely one year old, big eyes under a cowlick of short brown hair, as Mama’s and Papa’s backs arch below, turning the soil of the garden. The first three years on Greenwood Farm, while physically demanding for Mama and Papa, were by comparison emotionally peaceful years for our small family.

If I hover close, I can feel the hazy shapes of brightness and color, the loneliness of hunger, and the sweet taste of fullness that made up my world. Around me the chickens fluffed and busied in the dust of the paths as Norm slept nearby, fur warmed and dog-smelling in the sun, paws twitching after dream rabbits. Across the yard, goats hooved the ground and rubbed their horns on the cedar posts of their fenced pen. We didn’t know it, but we were all waiting. It was a feeling in the blood of impatience for spring.

As Mama and Papa turned the damp earth, two familiar brown birds alighted on the brush by the goat pen, fluffed their feathers, and sang out in perfect pitch, “Old-Sam-Pea-bo-dy, Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.”

“The white-throated sparrows,” Mama announced, looking up from her work.

“They’re back,” Papa acknowledged, resting on his fork handle for a minute to watch the sparrows hopping across the ground, searching for seeds, and rustling in the leaves. The arrival of the seasons was the one thing we could trust, and in their regularity we found our livelihood. Spring urged soil preparation, planting, and growth; summer brought the reward of ripening and harvesting; fall meant storage and preparation for winter. And if we were successful during the growing months, we could hibernate and rest in winter. Then spring returned, and the cycle commenced anew.

Soon the world was full of birds. They coursed the air like thoughts in the brain, twittering, singing, and building their nests. Red-breasted robins pulled at worms, blue jays jabbered, nuthatches walked upside down on tree trunks, woodpeckers rat-a-tat-tatted. There were pearly blackbirds, the flash of scarlet tanagers, bright finches. Crows and seagulls scavenged at the compost heaps, and flocks of swallows scattered in unison across the sky.

The presence of so many birds was a great comfort to Papa, despite their inclination for stealing seeds from the garden before they could germinate. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had been published to much acclaim and controversy in 1962—its title alluding to John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (“The sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing”). In her groundbreaking work, Carson’s research indicated that insecticides such as DDT were weakening the shells of birds, causing the offspring to die before hatching and threatening the extinction of peregrine falcons and the American icon, the bald eagle.

Used heavily since World War II as an agricultural pesticide, DDT was also, horrifyingly in retrospect, sprayed into wallpaper with the claim that it would protect children from mosquito-carried malaria. While studies have shown that DDT can cause infertility, miscarriage, and breast cancer in women exposed during youth, at the time Carson faced criticism and lawsuits from the chemical industry, especially Monsanto and American Cyanamid, which argued that DDT was safe, and that without it people would die from diseases like malaria. Nonetheless, the public outcry was such that the pesticide would be banned in the United States by 1972. Rachel Carson’s message was so effective, perhaps, because birds represent freedom—the iconic bald eagle—and anything that threatens that freedom threatens us.

Papa saw the incident as yet another example of chemical companies defending their profits and letting the environment pay the price. He liked to quote a little poem by Ralph Hodgson:

I saw with open eyes

Singing