Where trouble melts like lemon drops
All winter, we’ve had a varied thrush visit our porch every day. He joined our normal visitors: nuthatches, juncos, towhees, squirrels, and the chickadees who raised their babies in our bird box the last two springs. He comes to sort through the food the messy chickadees and nuthatches throw to the ground from the feeder above. I started seeing him late last fall, and excitedly pointed him out to Joe, since it was the first varied thrush of the season I’d seen.
(Don’t know what a varied thrush is? See more info here. Or watch the opening credits for Twin Peaks.)
My first experience with a varied thrush was at my old job at the wildlife center. I had only been in the job for a few weeks, and was shadowing in the exam room when an injured bird was brought in.
“What kind of bird is that?” I asked (a common question for me, especially when I first started working there) as the rehabber was completing the intake exam.
“It’s a varied thrush,” the rehabber explained.
“Oh!” I said, excitedly connecting dots in my head. “I saw one of those the other day but I thought it was a fucked-up robin.”
The varied thrush is similar in size and shape to a robin, but it is not, in fact, a fucked-up robin. A wintertime visitor to Western Washington, they arrive in the late fall/early winter, often showing up at feeders looking for an easy meal (who can blame them) and adding their haunting song to the cacophony of winter bird noises. They then leave in early spring to go off and make egg babies.
I’ve become quite attached to our varied thrush visitor. I look forward to seeing him every day and, though logically I know I don’t need to worry about any of the bird friends who regularly visit our porch after I’m gone, it comforts me to know that this varied thrush will move on not long after we do, that we’re making our migration together.
*****
Remember the movie Garden State? It came out in 2004, right after I left college, and I was OBSESSED with it. The term “manic pixie dream girl” hadn’t been invented yet and I REALLY identified with Natalie Portman’s character, as well as Zach Braff’s meandering thoughts on what it meant to be home.
I was so obsessed with this movie that, when it ended, I would just start it over again. I made my parents watch it and they thought it was terrible, and I was VERY offended that they didn’t recognize its brilliance. However, when I watched Garden State years later, I could barely make it through the movie. It was so cringeworthy, I had to look away at times. I haven’t been brave enough to try it again, maybe it’ll come back around…but I doubt it. (Still, we’ll always have the soundtrack.)
Quality issues aside, the movie did make me think about what makes a home. As we set off to embark on this journey across the country, I’m once again wondering what makes home…HOME. We’ll have to create a new home as we get settled in Ohio, which sounds exhausting, but at least it won’t be the first time.
*****
At my very last therapy appointment, we talked a lot about the upcoming move, and my therapist asked me whether I thought of Ohio or Washington as home. It was a hard question to answer, honestly. We’ve been in Washington for five years now, so of course it feels like home. I love it here. Had cancer never happened, we might never have left (sorry, everyone in Ohio).
But Ohio is where our families are. It’s where I was born, where Joe and I both grew up, where we met and fell in love and got married. So Ohio will always be home as well. But how can you have two homes? How are we moving from home TO home?
It reminds me of all of those confusing things I felt after college, when I moved back into my parents’ house, but it didn’t feel the same as before I’d left for school. Eventually, I moved to my own place, which was exciting and fun, but it still didn’t feel like home. Later, I moved in with my friend Heidi and we created a ridiculous home, where we hosted parties and friends slept over and we created Football Night, which for us was eating a bunch of junk food while we watched Thursday night TV. It hurt when we made the decision to no longer live together (because of BOYS) because we knew that idea of home was ending.
When I met Joe, and we decided to move in together, it finally felt like we were making permanent strides to the idea of home. We got married, we had our own Christmas tree, we got a dog (obviously the most important step). We eventually bought a house and after years of perfecting our little slice of the world, we were like, “WELP, better move to Washington.”
The first couple of months in Washington were tough. I was here alone, starting a new job, knowing no one. I found an apartment for us and explored the area, cataloging places that I wanted to show Joe when he got there. I flew back to Ohio a few days before my birthday and we loaded up the car (with our stuff and our dogs!) and drove back to Washington. It started to feel more like home as soon as Joe and the dogs walked into the apartment I’d found for us. We got to know the people and the area around us, and we’ve slowly been saying goodbye to both ever since we made the decision to go back to Ohio.
*****
Last Saturday, we gathered with some nerdy friends for night tidepooling, which is just like day tidepooling, only it’s harder to see and easier to fall down. Thanks to COVID and being immunocompromised, I don’t go out a lot anymore, not for socializing, so I was so excited to see the group that had gathered to tromp through the freezing water and brave the cold and the dark just for the chance to see some cute sea creatures. I was so grateful to get that last PNW experience and to be able to have fun with and say goodbye to these people we were lucky enough to get to know while we were here. And yes, OF COURSE, I cried on the way home but it’s OK. Crying just means it mattered.
We’re not just saying goodbye to people, though, but to this place that feels like home, and to all of our favorite spots. Early in the pandemic, when I started working remotely, I’d use my lunch break to take walks at the nearby park, which had a series of short hiking trails winding through a small wooded area. Though small, this forest was home to all manner of wildlife: chickadees, squirrels, juncos, wrens, a variety of woodpeckers (coyote, deer, bobcats, and bears have even been spotted on nearby trailcams).
But it’s also where I found the ravens. Once we discovered these ravens had a nest, I suddenly had something to distract me from how broken the world felt, and my friend Lauren and I spent hours surveilling the little raven family. I had a place to walk and clear my thoughts. After I was diagnosed, I had a place to rage and cry, with no one but the trees and birds to witness. I walked up one last time earlier this week, reflecting on how healing this place had been for me when I was struggling. I enjoyed some raven squawks, the sound of a babbling brook, a little kinglet hopping around on the side of the trail. I went to sit under the raven nest tree, the mossy ground damp beneath me. I closed my eyes, trying to see if I could conjure up the scenery around me, the feeling of being in the quiet forest, at will. I want to take all of that back to Ohio with me.
*****
I still don’t know exactly how to answer my therapist’s question. Like all hard questions, there is no easy answer. Where is home? How do you make a home? Can you have more than one? Maybe part of life is just trying to figure all of that out.
So far, what I’ve figured out is that home is wherever the people you love are located. Home is where the heart is, after all, as cheesy as it sounds. Maybe part of what makes being an adult so hard is that your idea of home expands so much that you have to take your heart, break it into pieces, and store it in all of these different places. But the beauty of that is that it means home can be anywhere and everywhere, all at the same time. And even though we’re moving home to Ohio, we’ll also always call Washington home.
Hopefully we’ll make it back here at some point. But if not, it’s OK. I’ll be carrying pieces of it with me, wherever I go. And I know I’ve left pieces of myself sprinkled all over the state (that sounds grosser than I meant it to).
Still. Someone please keep an eye on those ravens.