Hope and Expectation

The cuckoo was late this year. I fretted over that. Stood in the back porch, ear cocked to the bog in anticipation, talking sense into myself to overcome the disappointment of hearing nothing only ordinary birds, tractors, lawn mowers, the wind passing through the town land, the swish of time, rain on the roof top.

And then it finally came, almost reluctantly it seems. Several weeks too late.

I had always measured the call of the cuckoo by my middle son’s birthday. April 20. It was a new beginning time for me. Post winter. Clothes line bolstered once more. Inspection of growth in garden. Notes on how to proceed into life again after the dormancy of the dark days. Clean sheets billowing in the warm breezes we deemed fortunate to have journey in from the sea. That kind of thing.

But this year it did not happen. No cuckoo arrived on that date or around it. I was dismally disappointed. Twenty years of dependence gone out the door. I paced about. Brought it up in conversation. What the hell is happening with the cuckoo, I would ask my significant other, in the middle of another conversation quite removed. He would look at me and shake his head.

It rained alot these past two months. It was cold. We grew cranky with eachother. My bones ached, craved new sun. My mood grew dark as the cuckoo bided her time. Then tonight, dining al fresco, the cuckoo appeared and I actually saw it for the first time.

I’ll have you know, to those who are curious, that the cuckoo looks like a badly made teapot with a broken spout and she sits on the wires across the open meadow near the house and calls out in a most joyous, confident of ways. The cuckoo sounds like a great big bag of hope and inspiration and belief and everything solid you can ever imagine in this time when nothingness and plastic existence and pain takes over.

This night the cuckoo sounds like I have made the best dinner in the entire world and that I get a ten out of ten for trying against the odds for the most part and that those who lift their forks at this table are no fools, they know the sound of what matters, appreciate the return, the brief visit, the way it has always been and how soon after there will only be silence once again. Silence struggling in the midst of chaos.