I cannot remember if the black-eyed Junco appeared before or after my father died. I had been gazing out the window of my back door, the glass of which has probably not been cleaned in years. I am a woman of spontaneous priorities. Glass cleaning is almost never a priority and I have never spontaneously decided to clean glass. And so it almost never is cleaned.
When the Juncos come, I know the season is changing. It’s how I measure when it’s acceptable to wear blanket scarves and be less judgmental of holiday ornaments being hung in grocery stores. This Junco was the first of the year. It hopped across the brassy and green-tipped grass of my backyard. It is far from a turfy perfect suburban lawn. There are miniature plots of gardens which are some years tilled and planted, and rarely weeded after the first month of seeding. I prune my bushes when they become embarrassing to both the starlings and my neighbors. My yard differs from the window glass in that it is a spontaneous priority.
The birdfeeders, suet cages, squirrel feeders, birdbath, and twinkling kitsch of “décor” which litters my sad ash and sassafras canopies are routinely managed. The brightly feathered finches and fussy sparrow babies entertain my little claim of land. Territorial disputes of grey squirrels are probably my favorite form of backyard shenanigans. I like to imagine they are a bunch of senators at a town hall meeting discussing the futures of acorn stocks and then they all start arguing at which one is extorting safflower tax and embezzling aged peanuts.
At night, I enjoy the magnificent white fur of a silverback skunk and her kits, the possom’s creative attempts at sniffing out tossed out tangerines, and the white-tailed deer does watchfully graze. They eat my blackberry bushes. I let them. Once, I saw a little bastard fawn eat a whole oriental tiger lily that distilled a magnificent fragrance of which I quite enjoyed earlier that day. It could barely fit in it’s mouth. It shoveled the scarlet and white petals between it’s coal black nose and white vellum chin.
My priority is the wildlife. Not the glass window.
But, back to the Junco. It tittered around beneath a squirrel feeder, where the brown-up of autumn doesn’t apply, for this is an area which is the meeting ground of the Squirrel Senate and is thus constantly a dusty dirt pile year-round. It found a sunflower seed and flew away to a place I know not, but I’m sure it is nice and wonderful and full of the fantastic things that Juncos love. I have not a fucking clue what that is, as I’m not sure I know of what those exact things are to me now, and I am also not a Junco.
It left little footprints in the dirt before flying off to Junco paradise. This made me recall a time when I was very, very young. I was in the shower with my dad.
My father was the type of man whose priority was the glass cleaning. He would shut the shower faucet off and, strategically, had a bath mat and several towels at hand as to not get water everywhere. Everything including the glass was fully dried before stepping out. The exception, of course, was our feet.
As I was little, I would stare down and look at his large, alien-like toes and compare them to my wet little hamster paws which were my appendages. When he would move his feet to wipe something, a humungous lake would magically appear like a shadow where his foot had been. Each toe left it’s own individual puddle. This was amazing and perplexing to me. I would try to replicate this with my digits to no avail. I would watch the waterprint until it’s meniscus fell victim to the drain, where it slowly disappeared into an abyss that I wish I could fall into now. A place where I could swim with all my dad’s footprints and the water was still warm and the cold air outside of the shower would not attack me like the oncoming winter does now.
Beginning to cry at the sight of the Junco’s evidence, I took a shower. I looked at my feet after I turned off the water. I waited to see if I could leave the magical puddle prints I once tried so difficultly to achieve. While the water still goes down the drain, I remember other things. That water makes water prints. Those prints can make windows dirty. Water makes plants like ornamental tiger lilies grow. Water cleans the juncos at my birdbath, and water releaves the thirst in a soul that has been as of late, quite dry.
