the habits of baby birds

photo: jetheriot

The first time I heard her, I was sitting upstairs at the table in the dining room having breakfast. Me. Me. Me. Me. Some bird doing an impression of a car alarm that can’t be canceled no matter how many times the button is pushed. I went downstairs to the picture window in my studio which looks out on the back patio where I sprinkle birdseed religiously. Neighborhood birds stop by for breakfast, returning throughout the day if I keep replenishing the food. When I’m sitting at my desk working, I like to pretend the picture window is a movie screen. All day long, birds fly across the movie screen, land on the brick floor, dance for a while and leave.

lessons in acceptance

photo: jetheriot

1. Put a pot of dirt outside, but don't plant anything in it. Wait for God to blow seeds into the soil, then cultivate whatever lands and takes root.

catahoula

photo: jetheriot

the odor of ladybugs

LADYBUGS smell sweet, especially when you smush them.

one last ride

photo: jetheriot

On the twenty-fourth anniversary of the death of my sister, my mom and I went treasure hunting in Uncle Allen’s shed. We left with some old chairs in need of rejuvenation, a giant blue tricycle, rusted and flat, and the head of a plastic rocking horse with a big wooden dowel – what a kid would hold on to – still stuck through its ears. And the treasure of all treasures: a headless plastic rocking horse I pulled from beneath a stack of metal cages my mom lifted up.

oenothera speciosa

photo: jetheriot

getting the walnut down

photo: AndonicO

The impression a walnut leaves when it’s been pressed against and removed from a blob of Silly Putty is a copy of a walnut. Starting with one walnut, you end up with two: the walnut itself and the walnut-in-the-Silly Putty. The walnut, in a sense, has been duplicated. Of course, only one of the two walnuts is actually a walnut. The other one is a blob of Silly Putty indented where the walnut protrudes, concave where the walnut is convex, rubbery where the walnut is nutty. One is real and the other is fake. Likewise, a memory is a copy of something. And just as it’s impossible to make a copy of a document when the copier is empty of paper, it’s impossible to make a memory of a walnut without some substance to remember it, to reflect in its contours the contours of the walnut, to absorb on its surface the daylight the walnut scatters, to organize itself into an echo of a walnut.