Tenebrae

Winner of the 2014 AWP Intro Journals Project in Creative Nonfiction, selected by Lee Martin

I recently woke up to the jimmy bird and the weiner bird calling rakishly from the outspread arms of the evergreens. Their chatter wasn’t hard to parse: You want some of this? As it was barely spring, I envied their optimism, but I admit I bought into it a little bit too. The sky had gone from gray to blue overnight, after all; dozens of March disappointments aside, why not hope for better things? Moved by the same impulse that drove me as a child to dump my winter coat on the closet floor long before the fruit trees bloomed and tromp hunched and shivering to the school bus stop—pink cardigan slipped over my shoulders like a little maiden aunt—I reached up from my bed and pushed open the window. “Jimmy jimmy jimmy!” the report burst through the screen, then “weiner weiner weiner!” in emphatic shrieks. Back and forth they volleyed, beside themselves, it seemed, with joy. I got up and put on the kettle.

Doubtless the jimmy and weiner birds have proper, more dignified names, but I don’t know what they are. No Annie Dil-lard with her nuthatches and warblers, no Thoreau with his wood thrushes and whippoorwills, I’ve not taken up with birds. Weak-eyed and too clumsy for bird-watching, which requires a will and balance for thrashing through the underbrush, I choose to ruminate instead on trees, which have a happy propensity for standing still. Sinking annually into an Adirondack chair on my crumbling patio on a spring afternoon, back aching from performing scores of little abortions—uprooting the embryonic maples that plant themselves in the English ivy each year—I squint into a panoply of light and leaf and think about complexity.

Though scientists argue it’s not easy to define, biological complexity is generally conceded to match up nicely with our own thick cortexes. It is a condition much admired by those of us who, among the living multitudes, make up our planet’s proud complexity team. And while the fossil record insists more complex creatures are more evolved, who’s to say they outrank in grandeur or significance life’s simpler forms? We say it—we are the world’s great sayers.

Inspired by the recent intrusion of spring, which seemed to have burst through the wrong door and was no doubt scrambling for a way out, my neighbor George stepped outside and fired up his grill. As the aroma of his charring steak wafted over the fence to where I was squishing through the damp yard in wellies, rummaging for the small fists that would become fiddleheads, he waved at me with his tongs. Great as the grilling smelled even to my effete, vegetarian nose—and I took a moment to savor it—I couldn’t help considering it critically beside the seamless photosynthesis transpiring above.

How elegantly those big firs feed, making a meal of soil and light. So different from our own complicated blood-rites, where even nibbling quiche in a pretty café generally starts in a slaughterhouse and ends in a sewer. Who is living a loftier life? We with the napkins on our laps?

When George speared his steak and took it inside, I kicked off my muddy boots at the door and went in to sketch by the fire, where, bereft of both talent and training, I’d been trying all winter to draw. I’d taken it up because I wanted to see differently, as I believe artists do, able as they are to find lines in a landscape and, by lines, transfer a landscape to an empty page. I’d been scratching at the door of this mystery cult all my life and finally, jonesing for gnosis through trial and error, I turned to my friend Rhonda, a gifted artist herself, who teaches art at our school. She gamely sent me home with a book called Starting to Draw.

For weeks, hunched over a sketch pad in a pool of lamplight, I churned out wobbly rectangles as...