Four years in a row, a starling nested above my mother’s satellite dish, and she sat and watched through the chokehold of creeping debility how they fledged their offspring, plucked big fat worms from the roots of overgrown hostas and ripened their hollow-boned babies. She remembered the springtime when I was conceived, it was March but she wouldn’t know until May, the month one of her psychiatric patients knocked her down at the hospital and warned of some impending doom – I wondered if he knew the same ghosts as her; if they had once talked in the hallways where she put bodies to sleep – a friend of a friend, now tripping a hazard. He probably knew my birth was a prequel to my sister’s, who we pulled out in spring like the first proud dandelion. We wanted to grow more of her, so bright was she: a yellow lawn, perpetual task holding us hostage.

Perhaps eventually satisfied with the shape we’d become, my mother sat on her own lawn, in the dark pool of oak shade, the heart of her own isolation. She watched a hawk catch a mourning dove and snag it down through the sky, a blur of lethal coordination lost to her ailing limbs. My mother stilled her steady ache, settled into herself like the hills. She tells me the same story every time, and every time it is triumphant. How, after a long slumber, it is necessary to press your body back into the ground. That a mallard is shorn from God’s green and brown orchards, that a bird is the song folded inside the prayer. That to fly means to remember the way. She plants a runway of lights along the driveway and waits.

I could tell you a lot about him–not least of all, that he was going extinct. There were gulleys where his cellulite had wrinkled and collapsed; the lined face of a geological record of many long nights left washed by cold wind and strong rain. Even with age, I could see that the foundation held strong– behind eyes of sandstone, a firm limestone sureness, a weight that held him upright and skyward. I held his hands, cold and ancient; and saw in him a cavern of grief, a history of loving, and in that landscape the shapes of before, the many stray visitors and fleeting-held guests. Despite severance, and the solitude that followed; despite the rough-fumbling fingers of time, he held fast and unshaken, burnished rust-spotted skin like a page of topography for me to smooth out and study. In his absence, I learned to cherish the weather, found new heights to climb and places to surrender, beneath the shelter of his preservation.