Bright white sun my only company this summer morning. Glinting on slate roofs and gleaming on painted shutters; the sun is dancing in bountiful gardens zinnia to tomato vine, hydrangea to sweet pea; winking from treetops and sliding like satin over a coiled green hose, a silver bicycle, a child's red pail. The day smiling at me and me smiling back; not looking down, so I startle and "Oh!" out loud when a meter ahead of me on the sidewalk I spot a dead bird.
A robin she is, not a fledgling new to flight nor yet fully grown, laid out on her side on the clean concrete. No blood spread beneath her, no injury I can see, she is in fact beautiful with her ruddy heart of a breast still puffed out proud. Why? or how? I puzzle, shaken, as I walk on a half mile, looking up only when the supermarket looms suddenly before me.
What luck to see Mai, there among the yogurts with her rainbow striped gloves. It was in the frozen foods five years ago that Mai and I first met, the only two people around wearing wool gloves and sweaters in the blazing summer heat. Mai lived fifty cold New England winters that year I first moved to town, and she shares her advice for keeping fingers and toes warm, as well as her spare gloves on the occasions I forget to bring my own. We discover not just cold sensitivity, but we also have in common low blood pressure and a tendency to vertigo, and we joke that despite our obvious ethnic differences we are DNA sisters under the skin, members of a shared genotype. Mai is a sanguine spirit in the face of chilly temperatures and the open stares of ignorant, ungloved fellow shoppers; she is unruffled in response to her sometimes impertinent teenaged daughter.
Today it's not Mai's daughter who is with her but her friend Thérèse. Decades ago, Thérèse was a healthy young woman crossing a street, but a CEO in a shiny sedan ran a light on his way to a meeting that was more important to him than Thérèse was, leaving Thérèse barren and heir to a lifetime of painful surgeries that are paid for by a generous settlement with the CEO. Thérèse will tell you more about her physical condition on any given day than you need to know (especially, it seems, when you are in a hurry to get somewhere else). She is also the transmitter of reams of information on all matters of health-- biological, environmental, sociopolitical. As she speaks in her heavily accented but remarkably fluent English, points of light gather and twinkle in her blue eyes in a way that makes it easier for her husband to forget their childlessness. Today she is bothered by plantar fasciitis. Mai knows that pain too and I do as well and I can see where this conversation is headed so I quickly divert to the riddle of the dead robin.
Thérèse's got this one. She thinks the bird might have been sick-- the Departments of Health of all the towns in our region note a preponderance of dead birds such as this as a sign that West Nile virus is about. Mai laughs and says the bird could have just gotten pushed out of the nest. "That happens, you know, if the nest is too crowded. Sometimes one gets shoved out." And she laughs again. I blink, twice, and turning to Thérèse, ask her about the West Nile thing. Has she heard of West Nile in our area this year? Mai cuts her off and chuckles again about the bird being sacrificed, as if this is a joke that bears repeating. I have to go. I get what I need and head for the check out.
I get that Nature pursues its own ruthless Agenda with no regard for our individual human sensibilities and Mai is wise to accept this but to laugh? I'm not there yet. I'm not sure I ever want to be there. The afternoon clouds and I notice too late that I've missed the turnoff for the shortcut; I'm on the long road back. I'm confused, my bags are heavy and I need to get home. Home, where love is supple and abundant and there's enough food and bedding to go around and space is tight but we make do with what we've got. It's time that's our precious commodity. Not enough time sends us trampling over each others' words and brushing past each others' open questions and upturned faces; time hurrying on cleaves want from need, reveals truths we sought unknowing.
Still, you think you know a person. I don't understand. I want to understand, but I might never have the time to understand. My family will be hungry; I need to start cooking dinner. I take refuge in the bell peppers, in their ripeness an unyielding primary red.
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