It seems arbitrary that I will turn fifty. And yet this insignificance has me in an itchy way.
If I should live as long as my father, I have more than two decades ahead.
I am in a body more than twice as long as my beloved daughter was. In a body that I don’t quite recognize.
We know it will happen with time. The ‘it’, as in change.
*
Change or perhaps constant is these cranes making their crane calls. And the soaring and the migration.
It feels rightly more significant that I attend a moment of witnessing these trumpeting beings. The sandhill cranes glide and descend effortlessly on this particular Sunday. It was a Sunday two years ago that a migration occurred.
A different sort, I guess.
From one life to the next. I still exist in the unknown of what that actually means.
And it was this date a dozen years ago that I fell in love and my life would resettle in ways. Another passage that we know can happen.
*
It sounds as though some of these creatures are laughing and others guffawing from a different perspective. Who are they calling to? Does my sweet girl hear me call? The wailing or the muffled tears. Muffled because too many sounds of desperation have become unbearable to my own ears.
I have lived near these birds for more than half of my life and I am only now coming to greet them. This feels like another thing to grieve. Though I don’t quite know why. And still, I feel it.
A chapter of feeling existence, both lived and lost, and apparently also unlived. The latter might be more challenging to accept. This bit of time in which animals that fly, and call out for contact, and cooperate, touch an unembodied part of my reality, and is somehow still familiar.
*
There isn’t language, as much as this quite warm for winter sun to be felt, this orchestra to be heard, and this flight to behold, that give sense to this transitory moment.
The glass bottle I carry sounds with the breeze like a quietest tug boat that I am certain the cranes cannot hear. Nor the ducks that seem to be flourishing in their own unapologetic, grandiose manner. Or the darling littlest birds in the dry trees. I cherish this most quiet harmony that feels somehow deeply personal.
I am wondering what it is about being a woman soon to turn another decade that feels the need to be pardoned for her simple existence as nature. For her changing personhood, or for her own territorial defense.
This wildlife refuge offers some unintended wisdom that I graciously, though stubbornly, receive.