The weekend that changed my life

In 1992, I went snowshoeing for the first time in my life. It was Valentine's Day weekend. A friend at work had invited me to join a local hiking group for a snowshoeing outing in the Haliburton Hills north of Toronto. I had never snowshoed before, but Ron assured me there was nothing to it. I was 40 years old. I had been divorced and on my own for nearly 10 years, and during that time had discovered the pleasures of being outdoors.

Leaving work on Friday, Ron and I climbed into his Jeep. We picked up his wife Anita at their home in the east end of Toronto. As the winter afternoon light dimmed, we drove to our destination, a camp tucked into the shadows of the Haliburton Hills.

The cabins were rustic: pine veneer panelled walls, twin beds covered in red wool blankets, nubbly foam pillows, blue floral sheets, thin white towels. We had brought our own food. About 20 people had signed up for the weekend. That Friday night, the group gathered for the ritual opening party, held in the largest cabin. It had a small living room and kitchen, with some weathered sofas and chairs arranged in front of a small wood stove. Beer and wine flowed as we munched our way through pretzels and chips and chattered to one another.

About an hour or so into the party, the door opened. Two young men stepped into the cabin, stamping freshly fallen snow from their boots. The clamour subsided briefly as we all turned to look at them. One was tall and lean, with straight sandy hair and a slightly stooped frame. The other was a few inches shorter, not quite as thin, with thick black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. His smile was soft and shy. “Hi Ian and John!” someone shouted. The chatter resumed.

Ron and I were standing on the far side of the room, debating the merits of different brands of hiking boots. I cocked my head towards the door. “The dark-haired one,” I said. “Very handsome.” Ron looked over, turned back to me and took a swig from his Labatt's Blue. “Too young,” he pronounced. We went back to boots.

Saturday morning dawned clear and cold. The sky arched over the hills like a seamless blue tent. We packed sandwich lunches, snacks and thermoses of hot tea. I strapped on my rented beaver-tail snowshoes, and fell in line behind the others. To walk, you had to swing your legs out to each side to accommodate the width of the snowshoes. They felt big and awkward, clattering on the trail of packed snow like clunky, over-sized boots. Up ahead, a couple of people stepped off the trail into deep fresh snow. I did the same. The clattering transformed into springy, padded bouncing. I felt as if I was walking on clouds. Off trail, we bushwhacked through dense sapling groves, slid down snow-covered rocks, and used our snowshoes like shovels to dig steps into a steep incline. It was magic.

Mid-morning, we stopped for a snack break. I pulled out a plastic bag filled with raisins, cashews, almonds and a generous sprinkling of brightly coloured chocolate Smarties. I found myself in a circle with Too Young next to me. He was wearing a rich purple zip pullover on top of dark blue wind pants. His black hair was damp and spiky. He had hazel eyes.

“Would you like some Gorp?” I held out the plastic bag. Too Young – whose name was John – thanked me, and then carefully picked out a dozen Smarties. I twinkled at him.

That evening, we all trooped into the main cabin again for a communal supper of chili, bread and wine. I sat down on one of the sofas, and John slid next to me. We talked about our work, his as a software designer, mine as a freelance writer and facilitator. He was passionate about the outdoors, and had led hiking and canoeing trips while at university. He was 26.

The next day, we snowshoed together. A surge of playfulness swept over us. We chased each other on the snow, galumphing on the snowshoes. I threw snowballs at him. He dumped me into a snowbank. He ate all the Smarties from my Gorp.

The afternoon ended. It was time to head back to the city. I knocked on the door of John and Ian's cabin to say goodbye. He asked for my phone number. I kissed him on the cheek. On the drive home, I didn't talk much, and floated in a pleasant bath of memories. I had enjoyed myself. John was sweet and cute. But too young, of course. I returned to work the next day and completely forgot about him.

One Saturday morning about a month later, I was lying on the sofa, my nose in a book. The phone rang. It was John. Would I be interested in going out for a walk down by the lake one night that week?

And so began what was for me an incongruous courtship. I was too old; he was too young. I felt strongly attracted to him, but never thought of him as a possible long-term partner. I kept my heart light and detached and told my friends I was having a fling with a younger man.

John and I saw one another regularly. We spent winter weekends snowshoeing or cross-country skiing. When the weather turned milder, we hiked the Bruce Trail east of Toronto, listening to hawks screaming in the maple forests. The following summer, John introduced me to canoeing in Algonquin Park. I learned how to paddle, how to stern using a J-stroke, and finally, how to get out of a canoe without falling into the water yet again. In the fall, we spent weekends hiking in Killarney, or cycling on Manitoulin Island.

Winter returned. We went winter camping, and I learned how to build a quinsy – a sleeping cave out of hard packed snow. We had been dating for more than a year. We both felt comfortable and easy with one another. My girlfriends teased me, “Oh, he's just a friend, is he?” In early March of 1994, John and I flew to Thunder Bay to spend a long weekend skiing with his university friends in a cross-country ski race. The evening after the race, after all the friends had gone, we lay in bed talking about the future. John said he was considering travelling to Europe. Suddenly I envisioned life without him. My heart shrank. It was then that I realized that Too Young had carved a room in my heart.

And, as it turned out, I had settled into John's heart as well. He never did board a plane for Europe. Instead, that summer we rented a house together, and a year later were married.

The unwanted hair wars

When I grew into teenage years, my body changed in wondrous and terrible ways. The tiny nubs on my chest bloomed into soft white breasts. Hair grew grew dark and wiry on my legs, dark and curly in secret places. Pimples splotched my face. I squeezed them regularly, even though my father cautioned me to leave them alone. My mother, preoccupied with her long hours of nursing shift work and the looming debt of the farm, told me absent-mindedly that washing my face thoroughly would get rid of the pimples. I scrubbed furiously. To my horror, the pimples broke and bled, leaving a field of tiny reddish-black scabs speckling my face.

But the worst thing about puberty was my mustache. My upper lip was blessed with thick down that began to darken as I crossed into teen years. I was mortified. Having a mustache put me squarely into the category of “ugly girl”. That, combined with a weak chin, caused me to wince each time I looked in the mirror. And look I did, staring often at that face of mine, at the pimples, the weak chin, the mustache. Each time I despaired. I felt so ugly. Each time I searched for something redeeming.

I settled on my eyebrows. They rose above my dark brown eyes, thick and lustrous. I plucked them meticulously, carving them into a full smooth line. Secretly, I imagined myself winning a beauty contest in our high school: “Mary Lou van Schaik, proud recipient of the Most Beautiful Eyebrows award.”

Walking down the grey terrazzo-tiled floors in our high school, past rows of dull brown lockers, I held my head high. My eyebrows sailed ahead of the rest of my face, perfectly groomed and arched. Mentally, I wore an invisible face veil, praying that students and teachers alike would look only at the upper half of my face.

I remember ordering a home electrologist kit from the Simpsons-Sears catalogue. It arrived in a plastic case, with an instruction booklet which I found difficult to follow. I was too embarrassed to ask my father for help. After a week, I returned it. Later, I took refuge in bleaching creams and eventually weekly trips to the Diana Salon on Queen Street in Toronto. There I joined other women in the waiting room, all of us sitting with our faces bent, our eyes downcast. One by one, we were ushered into a room divided into work stalls, each stall separated from the other by a white hospital curtain. The sessions consisted of 15 minutes of torture, as a technician in a white coat poked an electric needle into a pore on my upper lip, pressed a foot pedal, and a jolt of sharp stinging pain zapped the offending hair. The procedure often left tiny burn marks. I bore the pain stoically, fed by an image of a hair-free face. After countless years, the shadow on my upper lip faded. Surprisingly, the pain was worth it. I felt normal, even liberated.

The decades have passed. Now well into middle age, I contend with half a dozen chin hairs and a slight darkening on my upper lip. My mustache no longer bothers me. Instead, my beauty fixation has returned to my eyebrows. About three or four years ago, I noticed the brown hairs were being replaced at an alarming rate by white ones. For a long time, I plucked out each invading white hair. Lately it's become a losing battle – there are just too many of them. “Accept yourself,” I told myself, and vowed to leave my whitening brows alone.

But old habits die hard. I actually love plucking those sturdy white hairs. It reminds me of those earlier days squeezing pimples. Such a satisfying feeling to rid the body of this or that imperfection.

I fell into temptation. Even though I promised I would not pluck, I looked in the mirror and a crop of white hairs laughed and teased me. Come get us, they taunted. One evening last week, I reached into my cosmetic basket, which holds dusty relics from earlier years: a bottle of foundation that probably should be thrown out, some old red lipstick, a case of mauve and grey eyeshadow, two pairs of nail clippers, an eyebrow brush and my trusty tweezers. The nail clippers and tweezers straddle the basket's rim, within easy reach.

Unlike the brown hairs, the white ones grow in straight and bristly, like pine trees in a forest of maples. I looked carefully at two or three, took aim with my tweezers, and missed. Out came half a dozen regular brown eyebrow hairs. I tried again. Another miss, and six or seven more brown hairs lay curled on the tips of the tweezers. I began plucking fiercely, picking up speed, assuming that by going faster, my error rate would decrease. Wrong assumption. More brown hairs fell to the sink and still the crafty white ones stood out defiantly. I finally parted all the brown hairs, like sedges in a swamp, isolated one white one, positioned the tweezers firmly on it and yanked. Out it came – along with a cluster of fledgling brown ones.

There was now a rather large gaping hole in my eyebrow line. I looked like I was suffering from a minor skin disease. I dug into the cosmetic basket and drew out the eyebrow brush. No use – no matter if I brushed up, down or sideways, the hole remained.

So now my right eyebrow has a miniature clear-cut patch in its forest. Meanwhile the left eyebrow boasts a flock of strong white rebels. The hairs refuse to lay down neatly and the brows look lopsided. I may have won the mustache war, but have definitely lost on the eyebrow front. I'm leaving them alone.

Our Christmas Creche

When we were growing up, our Christmas tree often went up on December 24^rd, just before the day itself, and always came down on January 6^th, the Feast of the Magi. My father would choose a five-foot spruce from the grove that marked the boundary of our farm. Once home, he stood the tree in a bucket of wet sand set in the middle of a low wooden platform made from old two-by-fours and plywood, and secured the tree by wires into a corner of our living room. The tangy smell of spruce needles spiced our excitement.

Dad hauled the large box of Christmas decorations up the basement stairs. He pulled out a square green and red checked cloth, snugged one edge close to the base of the tree and draped the rest over the platform. Tangled clusters of lights were unwound and tested. The bulbs were old and soft-nosed. Years of use had worn off bits of paint to reveal tiny filaments blazing through the scratched blue, red, green and yellow glass. The decorations were wrapped in yellowed tissue paper. We children were allowed to help, but only if we were very careful and very quiet. Shiny gold and silver balls threw back contorted images of our faces when we peered at them up close. Bright blue and red metal balls, light as breaths, twirled and sparkled on the tree branches. There were a couple of Nutcracker toy soldiers, smartly decked out in red and black uniforms, some blown glass snowflakes, a dozen twisted strips of shiny tin, and a silver foil garland that zigzagged around the tree. An eight-pointed gold star leaned precariously from the top, lit from behind by a tiny yellow bulb.

Dad went back to the basement, returning with a large flat cardboard box. He placed it carefully on the sofa and lifted the cover. The Christmas creche lay hidden, the plaster statues wrapped in newsprint. My father forbade us to touch them. The creche had been in my mother's family when she was a child. It had survived the ocean crossing when my parents emigrated from Holland in 1950. Dad was determined that the pieces would not fall prey to our clumsy and careless clutches, unlike the blue and white china that had so often slipped from our hands and had soon been replaced by turquoise melmac.

My father unwrapped each statue and wiped away last year's dust with a rag. As each piece was placed under the tree, the Christmas story came to life. Mary knelt beside the manger, her light brown hair partly covered with a cream shawl. Her blue robes were edged in orange, her hands joined in prayer. Joseph knelt across from her, his dull brown robes matching his beard. Close by, a chocolate brown cow and a long-eared black mule stretched their necks toward the manger. A short distance away, two shepherds bent forward, intent on finding out what lay underneath the shocking star. One carried a lamb balanced on his shoulder, the other held a crooked staff in one hand and flung back his dark green cloak with the other. Three curly-haired grey sheep grazed on their tiny grass bases. Far back, half hidden by the drooping branches, the three wise men marched slowly across the cloth desert. Two looked like Bedouin: swarthy faces set off by glittering eyes and pointed black beards, their heads wrapped in crimson turbans, gold rings dangling from their ears. They wore cloaks, short pleated trousers and pointed shoes. One carried an incense burner, the other an urn. The third Magi was dressed in sable robes, a jewelled crown circling his head. Kneeling, he held a box, presumably filled with gold. Trailing the procession was a servant leading our favourite piece, a proud camel bearing a polished saddle.

And in the crib, on a bed of dull ceramic straw, lay baby Jesus, more the size of a four-year old than a newborn infant. His sturdy legs and feet protruded from a short cream tunic with a brown sash. His arms were stretched out, palms up. His dark eyes gazed out of a calm and unsmiling face. Directly above, an angel swung from a low branch and looked down adoringly.

As Dad unwrapped the last of the pieces, my siblings and I fell silent, our wrangling corked for a few moments. One of us stretched out a hand to pet the cow. “Blijf af!” barked my father. “Keep off!”

When he turned his back, we slyly slid a finger along the cloth to touch a sheep. We were sorely tempted to stroke the camel's long brown neck – but that was risking a sharper yell and a clap on the ears. For the moment, it was enough to sit quietly, watching our tall stern father, weary from endless farm chores, adjust the placement of each piece so that it matched a timeless order, the only order in the world for him, the order of his faith.

My father has been dead for more than 20 years, but the creche survives, now part of the Christmas tradition for my brother David and his family. I lingered over it during our visit this year. Mary's lipstick has been refreshed in coral, to match the edge of her orange cloak. One of the Bedouin kings bears a scar around his neck, evidence of vital repair after accidental decapitation. The mule is minus half an ear while the camel stoically endures a hole in its plaster neck. But the Magi's eyes still glitter, and baby Jesus still directs his impassive gaze on the world.

The stupidest thing I ever did for love

The stupidest thing I ever did for love was to stay in a marriage way beyond its life.

I married my first husband when I was 21. He was 25, tall, lanky, funny -- and cold. On our honeymoon in England, I discovered to my dismay that he was not all that interested in sex. He liked to burrow in a cocoon when he slept, carefully tucking blankets close around him as if to ward off any intruding hands. Hands that wanted to touch and be touched. Hands that wanted to light fires and not put them out. Hands that were mine.

We returned from our honeymoon and took up domestic life. We had sex once a month - or so. I pushed down my desires and resigned myself to the reality of what my mother had told me one afternoon before I got married. She and I were sitting in green webbed lawn chairs underneath the chestnut tree in my family's back yard, The remains of tea and cookies lay on a tray on top of a rickety brown, metal folding table.

"Marriage isn't always pleasant," said my mother. "It's mostly hard work."

That made sense to me. Hard work: everyone in our large family of nine worked hard. We rarely spoke of pleasure. Instead the conversations revolved around the chores. Doing dishes, making dinner of boiled potatoes and burnt steak, picking green and yellow beans from the garden, hoeing the broccoli, cutting the grass, setting out the daily bowl of applesauce for my father, cleaning our one bathroom and tidying the small living room which twenty minutes later dissolved into an unbelievable mess yet again.

Hard work. We knew what that was. Perhaps another family could create a perfectly clean house, a perfectly hoed garden, a perfectly cooked meal. For us, that perfection was never realized, and the only reality was endless, wearisome, dusty hard work.

So when my mother equated marriage with hard work, I swallowed it, even though the idea had a taste as bitter as the green kale she used to boil to death and feed us.

I spent 10 years in my marriage. Ten long years of working hard at it. I moped and glummed, as did my husband. A few times, I gathered my courage and raised the issue of our sporadic sex life. We went to a sex therapist. She advised us to broaden our definition of sex.

Most of the time, I simply muffled my desires. Yet I was a passionate person, and the desires leapt out anyway, like a fire I couldn't put out even if I wanted to. I fell in love with other men. More precisely I developed crushes. I held hands with Sidney Morris after our Edmund Spenser literature class; I stood far too close to Peter Ferguson who worked in the same bookstore as me; I kissed George Riley at a communications conference. Each forbidden look, touch and kiss brought guilt and a Catholic determination to stop. After all, I had made my bed. I would lie in it, lonely and untouched, beside the man who was my lawful wedded husband.

Then one day, as I bemoaned my fate to my sister-in-law, she said, "Maybe he isn't the right man for you." At that moment, her words unlocked a door. I pushed it open and caught a glimpse of another life, a happier life, another me, a happier me. At that moment, I knew my marriage was over.

Carrots, potatoes and timing

The other day we were planning a pot roast dinner to share with our next door neighbours. One of them is highly allergic to our cats. When we invite them for dinner, we make it at our place and truck it over to their place in a wheelbarrow.

John was in charge of the pot roast, and began cooking it in the early afternoon. By 4 o'clock the simmering meat was dressing the air with tantalizing smells. Meanwhile, I had made beet salad, and peeled and cubed carrots for the roast. John said he would peel potatoes and cook both vegetables. Our friends were taking care of dessert. We were due at their place at 6. Luckily, they live two minutes away.

The clock ticked away. It was 5 p.m. Was John planning on cooking the veggies in the pot with the meat? If so, he had better get a move on. Such was my thinking.

Meanwhile, John sat in his office upstairs, immersed in some mysterious alchemy as he programmed his new toy, a tiny 5”x7” laptop computer. As usual, he had fallen prey to the trance of geekdom. Hours could go by without him realizing it.

On the other hand, I'm hard-wired to a clock. I'm forever slicing my day into 15-minute periods, checking the time, figuring out what has to be done by when – and then doing it. Here was a classic set-up: John oblivious to the time, and me clanging around like one of those kid's alarm clocks with the smiley face and the oversize metal bell on top.

At least three times it was on the tip of my tongue to remind John of the time and what he still had to do. Mentally, I crafted these reminders carefully: “John, would you like me to peel the potatoes?” Hint Hint. Or, “Honey, what were your plans for the potatoes and carrots?” Hint Hint HINT. Or, taking a page from Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, which I had recently read, “Sweetie, would you be willing to....” To what? “To get your ass down here and finish cooking?!”

I bit my tongue, heeding an inner voice that calmly told me that it was none of my business, that John always kept his promises around cooking, that in the worst case, we could finish cooking the stuff at our friends' place. Meanwhile, my emotions felt hot and simmering, just like the roast. I could barely keep a lid on them. The cool inner voice invited me to stay with the emotional heat, observe it, feel it.

At 5:15 I fled to the bathroom to take a shower, closing the door just a little more sharply than normal. It wasn't quite a slam, but inclined towards an exclamation mark. “Observe the irritation,” said the voice. “Notice its edgy sharpness. Feel it boiling in the chest.” At 5:20 I briskly toweled myself off, slapped my old terry robe around me, and stalked to the bedroom to dress. I purposely avoided looking at John as I passed his office. “Notice your hot and flushed face. Feel the heat behind your tongue.” As I was pulling on my jeans, I heard John's chair creak and his footsteps patter down the stairs. It was 5:30.

I found him in the kitchen peeling potatoes, water on the stove nearing a boil, the cooking carrots immersed in the thick tasty gravy enveloping tender chunks of meat. He greeted me with a warm smile. I was grateful that I had kept my inner frenzy to myself – although, what would have happened if I had told John what was going on inside me? That too would have been worth observing.

The potatoes went into the pot, and were done in 15 minutes. Everything was ready to go by 5:55. Perfect timing.

A date with my father

In November of 1988, the year before my father died, before any of us knew that the cause of his troubling fatigue was inoperable liver cancer, I invited him to a piano concert. The great Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel was playing Beethoven at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. My father and I shared a love for classical music. Yet we rarely went to concerts together. In fact, I could count on one hand the times we'd been alone without my mother. And so, with me in my late '30s and he in his mid-'60s, I considered this concert a special date.

My father made the hour-long drive from Guelph to Toronto, and met me at a downtown bistro for supper. We sat at a small round table covered with a yellow cloth that matched the ochre-painted walls. I had dressed up for the occasion. I wore a chic black wool suit, set off by a brilliant white silk blouse with a ruffled neck and cuffs, sheer black stockings and classic pumps. My father wore an old pair of brown suit pants, a faded white shirt and brown striped tie. He had replaced the brown suit jacket with a tan acrylic cardigan. His left hand was wrapped in a gauze bandage; I think he had cut his hand. A former farmer, he had recently retired as the chief gardener for the mental hospital in Guelph. Even though he no longer officially worked, he was always tinkering with some equipment, and his large hands were constantly beat up.

He appeared out of place, tilting the bentwood chair backwards, a country hick in the trendy city bistro. I felt embarrassed by his shabby clothes. His looks redeemed him to me. My father was still handsome as ever, blessed with classic proportions of eyes, nose and chin. His thick dark brown hair had turned salt and pepper, with more space on top. His dark brown eyes were steady. He was thinner, however, and his frame seemed to have shrunk. He no longer towered over me; in fact, we were now almost the same height.

I ordered a glass of red wine, my father took a ginger ale. The waiter placed our dinners of salmon and steak on the table. My father ate clumsily with his one good hand. We made polite conversation, not knowing quite what to say to each other, sensing the absence of the social oil my mother would have provided. But somehow we made it through the meal, determined to enjoy this rare evening together.

The time for the concert arrived. We walked east on King Street to the hall, the wind tearing at our faces in the damp November evening. Our seats were in the first balcony, not too close and not too far away from the stage. People threaded past our knees.The long black Steinway stood regally in the centre of the stage, surrounded by musicians warming up. Short passages of discordant sounds jockeyed with the murmuring buzz of people talking and whispering to one another.

Finally the house lights dimmed. The first violinist walked on stage and the orchestra tuned up. Everyone fell silent. In that hush, Alfred Brendel emerged from the wings. His famous bulging eyes looked out at the audience from behind his trademark thick black-rimmed glasses. Brendel shook the hand of the concertmaster, bowed to the audience, and calmly sat down on the piano bench, flipping his formal black tails over the back edge. He paused for a long moment, then placed his stubby fingers on the piano keys. The opening chords of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 reached our ears. The sound was full, but somewhat faint.

My father and I glanced at each other. Simultaneously, we slid our hands into our pockets and pulled out our hearing aids. My father swivelled his into his left ear, I put mine in my right. We looked at one another again, grinning, and settled back, ears primed, hearts connecting through the music.

Lost and Found

It's said that the Hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) has one of the loveliest songs in the entire bird kingdom. I believe it. Fourteen years ago, when we first moved to the Gatineau Hills, we rented a house high on a hill. A Hermit thrush nested on the property. It was the first bird to break into song before the sun rose and the last to be heard after the sun set. I opened my bedroom window wide, totally enchanted.

The Hermit thrush's song consists of a soulful melody, four or five clear, flute-like notes spiraling upward in a minor key. The melody is then repeated at a higher pitch. Each phrase is sung slowly and leisurely with a long pause in between. I can't speak for others, but for me, the song induces a state of deep, serene calm.

A few summers after first hearing the Hermit thrush, we moved again, this time 15 kilometres north to the home we had built in the intervening years. The back of our house hugs a steep hillside, massed with tall white pines, maples, oaks and birches. At the front, it faces rolling fields where horses graze. From time to time, a deer or even a black bear ventures into sight.

To my delight, I discovered that our new home was also home to a Hermit thrush who sang from somewhere up the hill behind the house. This particular bird had a slightly different voice from the one I was used to, but there was no mistaking the haunting lyrical melody. I was happy. Many evenings, I would sit outside, listening to the bird, silently begging it to sing forever.

In the spring, the Hermit thrush's arrival completes the migratory roll-call, following the red-winged blackbirds, Eastern phoebes, winter wrens, ovenbirds, song sparrows and robins. Each spring, I wrote down the date when the Hermit thrush first appeared, typically the third week in April.

This year, from mid-April on I cocked my ear towards the hillside. No Hermit thrush. Day after day, I walked to the back of the house and looked up through the trees. I held my hands on either side of my ears, elephant-like, to amplify any bird song. No Hermit thrush.

After a while, I stopped expecting to hear my beloved thrush, resigned to the fact that for some unknown reason, it had not nested in its usual spot this year.

The days and then weeks passed. Early summer unfolded peacefully, lush with green beauty. Song sparrows cheerily whistled their accented triads as they skipped from bush to bush along the roadside, peepers trilled happily in the nearby swamp. Yet without the Hermit thrush, something essential seemed to have disappeared. In a small, quiet way, my heart ached.

Then, one morning, I found myself hearing, really hearing, other birds that I had never heard before. A Baltimore oriole cockily announced that the sun had risen. I rushed outside, binoculars in hand. After a few moments, I caught sight of its orange and black magnificence. The identity of other birds remained a mystery. Often I woke to the high tinny zeep zeep zeep of some type of warbler. Another sang a burbly run – was that a yellow-rump, or a Nashville? I never did find out.

These new bird songs intrigued me. Had these birds actually been there all along? What else had I closed off by magnetizing my love on only one thing?

My sadness melted. The woods were ricocheting with song, inviting me in.