What the Robins Knew

This was back in November, a couple months after my sister died. It was a beautiful day, but late in the season, and most of the leaves on the trees had fallen and been raked up and blown into piles in the streets and then carted away by the city. There's something totalitarian about this. The way you can't be a leaf and die normally, right there under the tree you gave all your energy to, all the whole three seasons of your life, for crying out loud, and four if you include the winter just before you were born, when the tree was dreaming you in the tips of its branches. Oh well.

I was coming from downtown, walking back from the library or the coffee shop, and thinking of my sister. Her contagious smile. Her unhappy soul. The note she left behind, "to whom it may concern." And I was feeling that emotion you feel when you say the word “gulf,” or maybe “vast.”  I've always thought that those two words were amazing for how small they were and yet how tightly they packed their meaning in. But then I sometimes think, “hmm maybe it's the very the shortness of the word that has has the effect of making the thing that it means seem bigger.” Or, to say it a different way, “maybe the word, when it's set up in your mind against the thing that it means, makes you (the speaker) feel about as small as the word itself." Do you see what I'm saying? Try it. 

Vast. 

Gulf. 

See what I'm saying? The gulf is around the word "gulf," not in it. And the word's own smallness makes the gulf of what it means seem larger. 

Or: the vastness of "vast" lies outside of the the word "vast." There it is, looming around the little word, making itself by relative comparison even vaster.

Anyway, I was only about a block away from our house, passing by a beautiful old brick building that used to be a school, when, hearing something, I stopped. On the grounds there, around the school, are several beautiful trees: a tulip poplar, which is tall and straight, a couple of bass trees, and several sugar maples. The birds were in the sugar maples. Singing, all of them at once. Not just a few birds either, but something like a collective choir. A garrulous village. A whole sonic census of them. I walked across the grass to get a closer look. 

During spring and summer robins tend to be fierce and territorial with each other, but when the nesting season is over, and all the young are raised, they all mellow out, and come together to hunker down and ride out the winter. They're named Terdus migratorius, but in places like Northwest Indiana, they never really migrate. They just pipe down and turn down the personal furnace. If you want to see them in winter, you'll have to look for them, because they're quiet and brown and like I say, hunkered, but if you look with any conscientiousness, you'll probably find some. Search the crab apple trees or hawthorns especially. Robins eat that wrinkled old fruit to supplement their fat stores. 

The wonderful noise. The mutual song. Time to taste it, time to enjoy. Robins. Robins. Robins. 

I'm not saying there's anything particularly pretty about their singing, especially when they're singing as individuals. Still, when they're all out there together, happy about life, happy about the sun, happy about having company, happy about being robins, well, if you're at all vulnerable to beauty, you can't help but stop and serve yourself some of the homey mince pie of their cheer. 

I sat down against the tulip poplar, and listened for something like half and hour.  I closed my eyes. There was that warm orange light softly rubbing my eyelids. And I sort of transferred the robins to my brain. I sort of imaginatively imported them, and there in the sad neuronal branches inside my skull they perched willingly and gladly sang. So cheerful. So sure things would be okay, at least in a way. Winter comes to everyone, but right now there's the sun. 

HB