The Birds and the Trees

The day before the trees came down, I hauled a pile of wooden ladders out of the undergrowth and tried not to think about poison ivy.

I try not to think about a lot of my yard, my home, my self. There’s just too much mess, and try as I might, I can’t seem to keep it all swept up. Even when I do manage to hack back the junk trees and vacuum the living room and floss between my teeth, the weeds and dog hair and plaque always come back before my willpower does.

To some extent, that’s just the experience of being a human in this world. I really am giving it my best. I use a cute little app to remind me to mow the lawn, scoop the cat poop, take my meds. I meet regularly with a therapist who takes my insurance. I dragged the ladders away from the weeds so the tree removers could do their job.

A pair of robins eyed me warily as I shuffled back and forth on that task, wiping cobwebs and desiccated spider corpses off my hands and onto my shorts. One had a dark head and a bright red-orange chest, the other’s colors were grayer, muted. A male and a female. Parents overseeing a nest somewhere nearby?

My own parents have been the ones doing the heavy lifting (literally) at my house lately. The plan is to replace the ancient, leaning garage with a new one at the end of a new concrete driveway (no more mowing the gravel!). While I was comfortably air-conditioned at work, Mom and Dad were gutting the garage, gathering estimates, and even scrubbing the pans that I’d left “soaking” in the sink for lengths of time I won’t admit to here.

My parents have the relentless energy and capability of cartoon superheroes. Dad can master any machine and fix any maintenance mire. Mom can reverse a tornado of mess in minutes and paint a house in an afternoon (to reference The Producers: “Two coats!”).

And me? I can begrudgingly drag a stack of ladders a couple of feet across the yard.

When I finished, I tried to find the nest that the birds were potentially guarding, but the overgrown edges of my yard were too dense to parse. The robins chattered at me from the power lines (that’s them in this essay’s header image) as I strolled the length of my lawn, splitting my attention between the tangled knots of the junk tree canopy and the reaching trios of poison ivy leaves that threatened my bare ankles.

Nothing. If there was a nest, I couldn’t find it. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or concerned. The entire jungle of my backyard was scheduled to be culled first thing in the morning, and if one of the dozens of vine-choked trees secretly housed a huddle of hatchlings, I wanted to mark it off to keep them safe.

So many critter homes were about to be demolished to improve my own home. Just one more thing to feel guilty about.

In the morning, before I could dare snooze my alarm, a fleet of trucks arrived, lining the narrow neighborhood street and releasing a swarm of men in matching helmets and patriotically-themed UV-resistant uniforms.

Arriving alongside them was my mother in a rainbow of gem tones and a twirl of skirt.

“Not this one!” she joked to the men, pointing with both arms to the spruce I planted eight years ago as they laid out chainsaws and harnesses on the lawn. “That’s Spruce Springsteen!”

[Pictured above: Spruce now vs. Spruce when I planted him (and blogged about it) in 2018. Also, all 5’2 of me for scale.]

The men were not in a joking mood. As I scrambled to find places to park cars out of the way, the workers slung weighted lines over the high branches of the nearest doomed walnut. They moved with the swift conviction of a platoon of ants en route to a picnic.

Unfortunately, I had my own work to attend to, so I didn’t witness just how quickly my yard was stripped of its decade or more of overgrowth. My mom and an ever-vigilant neighbor friend reported that the job was completed by the early afternoon. By the time I returned from work, everyone and every tree was gone.

Every tree except for two narrow trunks that twisted around and climbed up each other into a shabby spray of leaves and dying vines. There, nestled in the crux of the bonded trees, sat a nest.

The nest had shreds of plastic dangling from it like sickly-white jellyfish tendrils. There was that guilt again, that the wild animals who share my home are suffering because of my presence, or the general presence of humanity. It’s been a little tough to feel warmly towards mankind lately, after all. But it was a solid nest regardless, and I stood still and quiet to watch as the boldly-painted father robin arrived to feed the brood. A cluster of excited triangles bobbled up to meet him, hungry beaks that had survived the surrounding apocalypse.

The tree-cutters had spared them.

Over the next few days, I occasionally checked on the family, despite being swooped at by the parents. I just wanted to make sure they were still there, still OK. At one point, I worried that one of the parents had become sick. I saw the outline of an adult-sized bird, but it was very still, and its red chest was flecked with black. A quick check online reassured me that this was a healthy juvenile, just about ready to leave the nest.

Check out this big blotchy baby.

Which must have happened on a day I didn’t check on them, because the next thing I knew, my dad had returned to cut down the last two trees. He confirmed to me that the nest was empty; the kids had made it, and they’d all moved on.

I was sort of sad to have missed their departure. So much has changed so rapidly. My house looks bald without its cowl of unkempt greenery, and my heart aches for the massive walnut tree that must have been living here since before my great grandparents built the house I now own. When I left for work, that tree towered over my backyard, but when I came home, it was like there was a hole in the sky where its branches were meant to grow.

It’s for the best. This will make my life easier. Happier. I even feel guilty about that. I know the guilt doesn’t help anything, but it adheres to my brain like candle wax on carpet, seeping into every crevice and fiber, hardening by the second. My parents may be superheroes, but I have a superpower too: finding ways to be ashamed about absolutely any- and everything.

For now, the best I can do is meet the guilt with gratitude. I am lucky to have my own pair of robin parents protecting me and my home, even if that home is held together with literal and metaphorical garbage sometimes. I have been spared the overwhelm of navigating all these changes alone. What does it matter if I feel unworthy? The love and support are given freely, generously. I would be rude to reject such a gift.

It will take some time to adjust, but my new view is of a wide and limitless sky, and somewhere in it, young robins are soaring.

Hands in the Soil

When I lifted my hands away from patting soil into place around the spruce sapling I'd planted in our front yard, I noticed something familiar about my fingers. With the dirt deepening the lines of my knuckles, I recognized the strong, sinewy hands of my maternal grandmother. 

I've never had much of a green thumb. Plenty of houseplants have met a premature demise at my hands, and I'm a known killer of cacti. So, it was surprising earlier this year when I managed to keep a begonia flowering in my kitchen for a couple months, which is a big deal for me. There are a few plants at my office which I care for as well, including a century-old fern that once decorated my great grandmother's porch. This year, they've been in exceptionally good form. While I know this is primarily due to the outdoor conditions, I feel a measure of pride as I water and trim them, as though I could claim their success as my own.

I associate gardening with my mother, who keeps her gardens gorgeous and green throughout the spring and summer. I cannot imagine the Victorian home in which I grew up without hydrangeas bursting with firework blooms around it and swallow-tail butterflies flitting among flowering bushes in front of the porch. 

Some of her gardening prowess comes from her mother, my grandmother, Edie. When I think of her, I imagine her kneeling by a garden bed, gloved hands pulling weeds out by the roots, piling them next to her legs, tireless under the Michigan sun. 

Edie died as a result of her ALS on Christmas in 2011, surrounded by family. The year is significant, because at that time, I'd come out as gay to my parents and friends, but I can't remember if I'd officially come out to anyone else by then, or if it was a shapeless knowledge that seeped outward without me directly addressing it.

I don't know if I ever talked to Edie about my queerness, and that uncertainty tortures me.

Edie and I were close. I spent summers with her and my grandfather, Bill, camping in their RV or roaming the strip of woods behind their home, hunting morel mushrooms to fry in butter. My relationship with my grandmother was one of quiet, mutual understanding, a kinship of spirits. As much as I loved my parents, there was a need in me that could only be met by spending time with someone as much like me as Edie.

As a kid, I thought of my grandmother and myself as a pair of cats in a family of dogs. We were independent and aloof, content to devour books as we reclined in patches of sunlight, and to sneak away to peruse yard sales, seeking treasures and projects and discarded histories. So often, the world felt too loud for me, too overwhelming, and Edie could sense and relate to that, and would sit with me by the fire, and we could be comfortably quiet together, and be nourished by that.

A lot of our communication was nonverbal, a contrast with our more verbal family members. Our conversations were book recommendations and sewing projects and polishing found furniture and sharing ice cream at midnight. 

I'm so afraid that none of our actual conversations were about something that is so large a part of my identity as my queerness. 

Which is not to say being gay is or should be a huge part of one's identity, but in the current culture, it kind of is. I'm sure Edie would have accepted me... her son is gay, too. But I actually don't know much about her opinion of LGBT matters. 

What torments me most, though, is that regardless of whether she knew my orientation (which, given our silent conversations, she probably sensed to some degree anyway), she never met my wife.

Kelsey is such a significant piece of my life, and it astonishes me that she never met one of the other huge influences on my life. I think about how my grandmother wasn't at my wedding and I cry.

But then something will happen that reminds me that Kelsey is still meeting a part of Edie. I look in the mirror at my hair, graying early, like Edie's. I tap on Kelsey's arm when I see a sign for a garage sale. I use the garden hose to rinse dirt from my grandmother's hands.

Kelsey did meet my grandfather, when he was sick, close to the end. I think he knew we were together, but I didn't know how to talk about it. Kelsey recently told me about her one conversation with him, showing him a photo of her old truck, his face briefly lighting up. I wish he'd had the strength to show her his barn full of tools and projects. I wish they could have known how much alike they were.

Because day by day, we step more into my grandparents' shoes. We dream about camping by Lake Michigan as we stoke the fire in our backyard. We hunt morels, though we lack the perfect hunting grounds that Bill and Edie had. We take our dogs down to the shore to fish with us. We create things. We cultivate saplings.

Pulling weeds from the garden, our hands in the soil, we keep them with us.

Mom Friend

You know what I love? Found families. Found families are my JAM. There's something amazing about growing up and developing a new family unit with which to navigate the stormy sea of adulthood. 

Also, found family members are obligated to laugh at the dumb crap I post.

I'm lucky enough to have a great found family AND a great blood family. But today, I'm focusing on the dynamics of my found family. Sorry, blood fam. 

I read somewhere (here, actually) that millennials don't feel like adults until age 29 or later, largely because the key "grown up" milestones (like financial independence, owning a house, having kids) are less accessible in today's economy than they were in our parents' economy. I often feel like a little kid playing dress-up (in old hand-me-down clothes from my mother because I can't afford new clothes) when I'm sitting at my desk at work. Like I said in a previous post, it all feels like a desperate game of pretend. 

Which is why found families are especially important to many people in my generation. It's reassuring to have a group of people on your side to play pretend with, to fill in for the guidance and protection of the folks who raised you. 

Particularly blessed within a found family is the Mom Friend. We've all either had one or been one, regardless of generation. Typically, it's the friend who sends you those, "Did you get home safe?" texts, or excels at herding and caring for drunk friends, or dispenses warm advice (even when you don't want to hear it). 

In my various friend circles, I know of a few such pseudo-moms. And I have friends who have now become actual moms (holy wowza!). They are pillars of strength, beacons of hope, and carriers of Tylenol. These are the true Mom Friends.

And then there's me.

Usually, I'm the Whiskey Cousin of the friend group. The one that's reeeaaal heckin' strange, occasionally funny in a living cartoon character kind of way, and should not be trusted with adult responsibilities (or sharp objects). 

But found families need some kind of parental unit to maintain order, and as they say in Jurassic Park: "Life, uh, finds a way."

I have falsely ascended to Mom Friend status within my household. Like Trump in the White House, I have no business being there, I'm woefully ill-prepared, and my actions could easily lead to utter disaster.

Why did this happen?

• I'm the breadwinner of the family, kinda. I have a stable job (achieved largely through good luck, good timing, and good connections) with a predictable flow of income. I have no debts to pay (once again, through no merit of my own and purely through the generosity, forethought, and fortunate circumstances of my birth family). Because of this, it makes sense to have most of the household bills under my name. I'm in charge of a lot of the budget (and in turn, the meal plans), which grants a certain authority and responsibility to me.
• I'm neurotic. I worry about absolutely everything, and I worry about the fact that I worry about everything. So I fret over money, my friends' well-being, the diversity of food we're eating, having plenty of toilet paper on hand at all times, etc.
• I'm paranoid that things won't get done if I don't do them, whether or not that's true.
• I'm the oldest member of the household, and also the only one to be the eldest sibling.
• I compulsively give out advice, regardless of how much I actually know about a topic.
• It's my fault that we're all living together, making me the inadvertent glue of our quirky family.

I tend to be the one making decisions and delegating tasks to Kelsey and Cade. I'm usually in charge of meals, or at least am the one that is asked the mom-est of all questions: "When's dinner?" I'm the one who gets up in the middle of the night if the puppies cry (and also the one who almost always takes them out in the morning, regardless of our collective work schedules). I do most of the grocery runs, or when we all go together, I'm the one slapping Kelsey's wrist for sneaking Fruity Pebbles into the cart and getting unnecessarily flustered.

I take on a lot of Mom Friend responsibilities in keeping the house together, but I'm not a good Mom Friend. I'm the equivalent of the mom that had kids too early, is prone to emotional breakdowns, and gets wine-drunk on the back porch and tells her kids way too much about her sex life.

Fortunately, I'm not alone.

Actual footage of me, Cade, and Kelsey getting crunked in the kitchen (Source)

I may have Mom Friend tendencies, but so do Kelsey and Cade.

Cade is absurdly thoughtful and gave us Christmas gifts so perfect that Santa would feel sub-par as a gift-giver next to her. She makes tea to comfort us, offers to help in any way she can, and helps keep the house from being a cluttery disaster hole. 

Kelsey has repaired broken doors, torn porch screens, missing tiles, and more. Does that make her a Dad Friend? I mean, between that, the beer, baseball hats, and the terrible jokes... But she also introduces delicious recipes to us, decorates for the holidays, and often greets me with a bourbon cocktail when I come home from work (and if that's not right out of a 1950s Home Economics book, I don't know what is). 

We're a bunch of surrogate moms to each other, and I think that's a good way to be. We learned lessons of love from our parents, and it's nice to pass those on to each other, using our various abilities to solve the diverse challenges of growing up in the 21st century. 

Perhaps we're not top-shelf Mom Friends, but I think we make a good family. And really, everyone could stand to mother each other a little more.