Fourteen

There is one bird whose song I could do without—not the American Crow, which seems to have perched in the early hours on a branch outside the window of every bedroom in which I’ve ever slept, repeating its unselfconscious screech; or the Canada Goose, with its car horn of bird calls; or the Sandhill Crane, who bellows like a slender elephant from the bowels of recently seeded fields.

The bird whose song I could do without is not loud, or dissonant. Its shortcoming is no fault of its own, but merely an association I have made with its song: it reminds me of being fourteen. Of waking in a tangle of humid sheets on a twin bed in an un-air-conditioned house on a wooded 3½ acres after a full night’s sleep. The sheets are threaded between my arms and legs as if I had tried to knot together an escape rope in the middle of the night. It is nine o’clock in the morning, and I am trying to decide whether to turn over for another nap or wipe the mucus from my eyes and get up. But for what?

Summer vacation. Homework has disappeared like sand fleas after a receding wave, no holes left to even imagine its existence. The house is half empty, but full of industry: one sister is married and has moved out; the other has a boyfriend and a job. My mother is already outside hanging up her second load of laundry, hair washed and curled. My father left hours ago, in a tie, for work.

The only thing bound to happen on those days, at that age, in my comfortable world, was that the temperature would rise, and the Eastern Wood Peewee would call continuously.

The final tone in the three-tone song of this olive-and-gray bird is never quite as high or as strong as the first. The song descends from notes one to two, rises from notes two to three, and, on the last note, continues to rise, stretching the note like a ligament in the spine of someone who is tired of waiting.

My Audubon Nature Encyclopedia says, “This unobtrusive little flycatcher is associated in our minds with peaceful woodland scenes where its sad and pensive notes may be heard all day long in the green canopy overhead. Pe-ah-wee, pe-ah it says with plaintive accents, as if giving expression to some immemorial sorrow which had afflicted its race.”

Hmmm. Peaceful and plaintive. How can these two things go together? Yet that was what I felt at fourteen: secure in my parents’ house, abandoned by the impending adulthood of my siblings. I was on the cusp of everything—independence, love—but felt like nothing had ever happened and nothing ever would. Simply put, I was bored.

But in that Peewee’s song I heard my due: to be consumed by something so wholly as to not understand its costs or value, regret, hindsight, all those sentiments that come with life after childhood. On a hot, weedy trail in a recently logged woods I hear the Eastern Wood Peewee sing today and it still stops me dead in my tracks, pushing things to the surface: Am I where I want to be? Have I done what I wished?