Every spring, right about the time March Madness begins, a family of birds finds the perfect nesting spot, over the light in our carport and right above where I park my car. Some years it is sparrows, arrowing through the air, diving and dipping before making a leap towards the light. One awful year, it was starlings, aggressive and territorial, sharp-winged bullies that would swipe at my head and shriek if I took one step towards the car.
Every year, I could grab a broom, sweep their work away in a matter of a few minutes. It’s a messy risk, that I might get a little smelly surprise plopped into my hair on the way to work. They are noisy. I’ve had years where it’s been easier to just to move the car until they move on.
I don’t grab the broom. Birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and this is as close to seeing them as I will ever get.
The last few years, it’s been chickadees. Their nest is a hodgepodge of bits of lint, twigs, pine needles drooping and dropping onto the hood of the car, a beaver dam out of water. When I approach the car, the daddy chickadee stands guard, scolding me, scorning my need to get into the car, sounding the alarm to his mate, perched high above.
I love this tiny, fierce daddy chickadee. I’m a large, lumbering monster who drives an even louder monster, threatening his little family. And he’s not afraid to get in my face, to warn any nearby listeners that he’ll take me on, no problem. His fearless protectiveness, his bluster, his black, velvet-soft head above his downy brown feathers, make him adorable. He would fit in the palm of my hand if I were not his sworn enemy.
All parents know his song.
Within a day or two, he and I have a respectful truce. He will scold a few times and rattle his feathers, just to show who’s in charge. I will back out my car, slowly, and the garage door will lower behind me, and the sun will shine through the garage window and warm them in my absence. When I get back, I will look with care at the nest, straining for the sounds of little cheeps, wondering if the eggs are there yet, if life is on its way.
Except, when I get home from work a few days later, a cat is skulking around the garage door. And that was enough. Even if no attempt was made, the chickadees have decided their new neighborhood may be too expensive for them, and they have abandoned their brand-new nest.
I see no evidence, no scattered egg shells on the ground. Up above, overhead, it is quiet. No daddy chickadee scolding from his post. No murmured chirping. The nest is an empty, hollow circle, arms with nothing to hold.
You never realize how much you look forward to a song until you hear silence instead.
This time of year, we also see the work of the tricksters. Not the coyote in Native American stories—in our yard, the tricksters are the squirrels, digging up the dahlia and tulip bulbs from where I planted them and shifting them, just to let me know, in case I thought I was in charge, that I’m not.
One random rose-red tulip stands in a garden bed of yellow and orange, not in the middle but off to the side, blushing, flushed in the April sunlight. I know which of my neighbors is responsible. I find the baby oak tree growing, already a few inches high, from an acorn buried in the middle of my irises. It’s too close to the house to let it grow, so I transfer it the best I can to a better location, feeling guilty the entire time.
The squirrels don’t like the taste of the daffodils. Those stay put. But the tulips must be delicious. I find their rounded bones half-eaten, rolling on the ground, dug from the darkness, seeing the light too soon, in the wrong way, before the stretching and reaching and sprouting towards it even had a chance to begin.
Later I will see what they did to the dahlias, pink like cotton candy at the county fair, peach like cobbler eaten warm on the back steps. They may grow in the shade, but they won’t bloom.
We see the traditional, true trickster, the coyote, sometimes too.
One August morning, I had the window open, trying to usher cool air into the house before it became scorching outside. I heard the scritch, the scratch of claws against wood. A long, lanky coyote, the color of a gray sewer rat, jumped our faded six-foot fence and sprinted after a cat as fast as he could go, and then jumped over the other fence back out to the street.
The lightning flash of his fur, the startle of something wild where it didn’t belong, spiked my adrenaline and my wonder. I couldn’t hear the muffled thud as he hit the ground, but I saw him, a gray-brown blur in those last pearl- pale minutes before dawn, a reminder of why we shelter within walls while we sleep.
Several years before, I spotted another one, looking all wrong in a suburban soccer field, lean and gray and grizzled. For a split second, I thought it was just another dog, off leash and roaming, until I recognized its wildness for what it was.
The birds building above my car, the squirrels re-planting and eating my tulips, the coyotes wandering as we sleep—even with our machines, our tools, and our walls, we are still not completely in charge. We are not the center.
INSTANT NOODLES 