Twelve Ways of Looking Through a Window
The word quarantined—when I hear it, I can’t not think of you.
You were confined to your room for two years because of your illness, waiting. First for a miracle. Then for my visits, which were never frequent enough. Finally, to die. When you tired of waiting for death, you made death happen, by refusing to eat or drink. You didn’t believe in a god or a heaven, which made this final act even braver.
I remember the view from your bedroom window. You could see the magnificent ficus, the finches that gathered there, and the palm in which a hummingbird was constructing her nest, small as a sake cup. The morning you left this world, they all went on drinking sunlight, foraging, feeding, calling to one another, and sleeping, as if the day were no different from any other.
Almost two years have passed. Now a sickness looms, and there is no protection except to stay indoors, away from people. We can no longer continue as we were. We are forced to confront stillness, to confront ourselves and our fear of dying, of our loved ones dying.
Mom, how, from the confines of this four-room apartment, can I be brave? Is writing brave?
***
The poet Patricia Lockwood writes in one of her essays, “If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless.”
From the kitchen, I peer out at the Chinese flame tree in our garden—what we lovingly refer to as our garden but is actually the neighbor’s overgrown yard that our unremarkable, patio-less apartment overlooks. Papery fruits hang in clusters like those little jingling bells one occasionally sees on long, bohemian skirts, the tree’s ovate leaves thrusting outward, green tongues licking the air.
The red-whiskered bulbuls are garden regulars, and astonishing little birds. You’d be smitten. We learned that they’re indigenous to Asia and were first brought over to the States as pets. They boast black crests, flaming red vents, and red patches behind their eyes. Just now I hear them sound a series of staccato trills: an alarm. I look up. A red-shouldered hawk is flying just overhead.
Later, from the window in the shower, I can see the flame tree up close and all of its imperfections. Several of the leaves are beginning to yellow; a few have been partially blackened by blight. And the fruits now seem like kickballs abandoned in a schoolyard, sad and deflated. I look down at my fifty-one-year-old breasts as the water sluices through my body’s soft channels like misfit streams.
I remember your breasts when I showered you, how each dimpled aureole pointed down as if it wanted to return to earth. How I used to lift one tit to wash underneath it, then the other, and how afterwards you bent forward in the shower chair to let the warm water run down the length of your back. Exhausted and frail, but still beautiful, you were.
When I return to the kitchen, the tree looks like it did before, full of color, full of life. The bulbuls blaze out of it, singing.
***
We are building the days hour by stone-heavy hour. Each feels weighted with grief and uncertainty.
We read, we talk, we watch old TV shows and movies that comfort us. Mirren busies herself with schoolwork. We look at our phones too often, scrolling for the latest news, the latest numbers. Often we leave our beds unmade, our hair uncombed. Our songs snare in our throats.
Days pass and I feel like I’ve done nothing, contributed nothing, except meals. Going out to the store for groceries every other week has become a major event, taking at least two hours. Trader Joe’s has taped social distancing marks on the sidewalk; one shopper exits, one is allowed in. When I come home, I throw away my gloves, I take off my mask. We wipe down the doors, all the food in packaging. I wash my hands until they crack. I strip and take a shower. I look out the window.
***
It’s been quiet when I wake, no cars, no sirens. Light overnight rains have sifted down an additional hush over things. But soon the bulbuls are up, talking to each other. One of their bouncy morning phrases sounds a bit like Pleased to meet you! I ogle them through the windows and whistle; they cock their crested heads. I begin to believe they may be talking to me, asking me how I’m faring. I want to tell them I’m going a bit mad, but they probably already suspect this.
I learn that the Chinese flame tree may be over one hundred years old. I also read that Koelreuteria bipinnata has the ability to not only endure in poor conditions, but to thrive in them—it can suffer clay, loam, sand, salt, wind, excessive pollution, heat, and drought. Currently, the air in Los Angeles is some of the cleanest in the world. And it’s been raining. Does the flame sense these changes as it breathes in through those tongue-like leaves?
The mucus, I’ve read, thickens, submerging the trees of the lungs, hardening around them like a sap—
I can breathe. Patients are struggling for air. I think about this all the time now. I think about how with every exhalation we’ve two minutes to live, and how with every inhalation we’re granted another two.
Our lives can be broken down into these breath increments.
On average, we take 16 breaths per minute. 23,040 per day. Forty-five quarantine days (thus far) times 23,040 equals 990,720 breaths.
The sky’s lungs are clear; people are reporting they can see all the way to the sea from the adjacent hills. And when we breathe in we can smell orange blossom wafting in from our garden, perfuming the living room while we eat beans and rice with salsa.
***
Did you know trees talk to one another using what is called a mycorrhizal network, a complex underground system of fine root endings and fungi through which electrical signals travel? That mother trees can recognize their offspring and send them messages: Watch out for those insects; Here’s some extra carbon; That way there’s more water; Have some sugar, darling, and so forth?
Are you sending me messages? Often I hear you speaking to me: Babe, have you taken your vitamins today? and Yes, you, too, were like that at her age, and Stop now. Look out the window.
***
Trump was recently quoted as saying, “People are dying who have never died before.”
I think of those seventeen days it took for you to die the first time. I’m so damned grateful you don’t have to die again.
Across the country COVID-19 is devastating institutional settings, many of them nursing homes. I think of Vista Cove. I think of Angie, who brought you your meds; Mirna, who got you dressed and readied you for bed in the evenings; Lily, who changed your sheets and cleaned your room, and Mario, who puréed your food. I think of the hospice LVNs who were there at the end: Jessie, John, and Edward, without whom I couldn’t have survived.
People who are dying of this are gasping out goodbyes to those they love over FaceTime. They are dying alone in windowless rooms.
***
Trees can detect scents through their leaves. Trees are capable of measuring light and telling time; they can differentiate between wounds, between a deer biting off a branch and a human breaking one. Trees practice social distancing when they have to, what is termed “crown shyness”: keeping space between one another in order to share sunlight. Trees have families, and, like us, are reluctant to abandon their dead.
***
Spring has happened, without us.
I find comfort in the fact that everyone in our garden is carrying on: my bulbuls, the red-shouldered hawk, the crows, the lizards planking on stones, the squirrels rimming the pots, the fruiting flame tree now releasing those clustered fruits to seed. They’ve no idea that the human world has all but stopped. That the Harvey exit off the 134 Freeway is free and clear at 5 p.m. on a Friday evening. That the bulk of small businesses on Colorado Boulevard are shuttered, and are on the verge of closing permanently. That the only place we can buy toilet paper is the little café down the street because we can’t find any in our grocery or online. That we are wiping down with disinfectant our doorknobs, keys, faucets, groceries, mail, ourselves.
Today, it’s April 24th, and the death toll from this virus has exceeded one hundred ninety-five thousand.
***
Maude—the name Mirren has given the red-shouldered hawk—has been exceptionally vocal, particularly in the mornings. She—or he?— is striking in flight; her wings and tail are barred with black and white, and she possesses two marked “windows”: pale, crescent-shaped regions on her wingtips. From the bedroom I spy her flying into a tall eucalyptus tree; she’s carrying nest material. I thought I heard overlapping calls of slightly different timbres, and I was right. Obviously Maude has found a mate, whom we have not yet seen.
***
This winter we’d been planning The Big Trip to Portland, the one we couldn’t really afford last year. I’d already researched flights, and made a list of affordable Airbnb options. We’d thought mid-May would be an optimal time for a visit, before summer tourists arrived and things turned crowded and expensive, when the fickle northwestern weather was most likely to cooperate. We’d talked about visiting all the places that reminded us of you: your old apartment on Pettygrove, the Chapman School playground, Food Front Co-op where we’d shopped for meals together, Audubon, and the Arboretum in Forest Park.
I was about to book our flights when the shelter-in-place order came.
Your ashes are still in the same box, the same white bag the mortuary gave us almost two years ago. We’ve a note allowing us to take you on the plane. I wanted to tote you over to Lower Macleay Trail, between the trout bridge and the old stone house, and sprinkle some of your ashes at the base of a Doug fir. There was one we always stopped to feel up and admire whenever we walked there, remember? I imagine bits of you making their way down through the forest floor to the roots, and being taken up into the tree. You are given a second life as an ancient, guarding over the place you so loved.
I tell myself, Next year.
***
Today I see Maude and her new companion swoop into the eucalyptus where they are building their seasonal home. A few minutes later a crow flies into another eucalyptus, just a few trees down from the hawks’, holding what appear to be twigs and bits of frond in its bill.
I am shocked by this. How is it possible for a hawk family and a crow family to live in such close proximity to one another, I wonder? These two are enemies: hawks are apex predators, and crows are opportunistic feeders that often raid the nests of other bird species to feed on their eggs. But these are extraordinary times, and maybe these new neighbors have come to some kind of understanding. Perhaps both parties have discussed terms, and have promised to be respectful of one another as they practice social distancing?
I call to Mirren and she joins me in watching them from the bedroom window, where we decide on a name for Maude’s hawk partner: Harold.
-Elisabeth Adwin Edwards
Elisabeth Adwin Edwards’s poems have appeared in Rogue Agent, SWWIM, Menacing Hedge, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The American Journal of Poetry, River Heron, and other publications. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, and her chapbook, “The Way I Learn To Take It Like A Girl,” won the 2018 These Fragile Lilacs Chapbook Contest. A former regional theater actor whose love of language led her to poetry, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter in an apartment filled with books. Twitter: @EAdwinEdwards.