Grandmother Frances, Finally

My grandmother Frances had a chiseled chin and huge, haunting eyes. Maybe her eyes are just huge and beautiful, but because she has always been a specter in my life I feel them haunting me. 

I've always known of her, that she died when my dad was only four years old and that her sisters raised my father until his own father, my Granddaddy Logan, got remarried. But she was not My Grandmother. The grandmother that I knew was my Mama Ann, and she was the kindest and gentlest grandmother ever. She dressed in the colors of a newborn fawn, and her divinity has never been matched. I loved her very much and never thought a lot about the other grandmother, the one that died so long before I was born. Frances was relegated to a family story.

Yesterday I picked up the only picture I have of Frances and stared at it until it came to life and I began to cry. What were your dreams, I asked the picture as I pried it out of the dime-store frame to see if there was anything on the back, a date, a clue about where it was taken. I discovered it was cut out of a page in a yearbook, so I assume it was taken when she was in high school. She was only 18 when my father was born, only 22 when she died of complications from a miscarriage. 

Daddy said he didn't remember her much, and his only memory of her death was standing at her gravesite while people tossed dirt into the hole as the casket was lowered into the ground. It reminded him of the opening scene of Dr. Zhivago, he'd say, and tears would well up in his own beautiful, sparkly eyes. Did he get those eyes from his mother, I wonder? 

Now that I am a grandmother the world is different in so many ways. Yesterday I was hit with the full understanding the young woman in this photograph was really my grandmother, not just a family story. I held the photograph in my hands and willed her to know that the little boy she left behind, the four year old Robert would follow his burning dream and become a renowned herpetologist. She would be the grandmother to me and my brother, the great-grandmother to our three daughters, and the great-great-grandmother to Annabelle and Ruby. Ruby, incidentally, is four years old now. The idea that she could lose her mother and the memories of this rich life they have together is wrenching. 

You did well, I said to that photograph. Your sisters raised your little boy until his stepmother could take over. She loved Robert and he was happy until the day he died. I want her to know all these things and if I could just get in a time machine and go back and tell her I would go in a New York minute.

I think about my own tender role as "grandmother," and the stark reality that I will not be alive to see my grandchildren when they are the age I am now, 56, and the tears start up again. 

I cry a lot these days. Maybe it's the pandemic and the fact that I have not hugged my mother or even seen her except through a window in nine months and likely won't for six more. My Mother! Maybe it's the emotional battering I feel from hearing people up in arms over wearing masks while also hearing about parents and other loved ones dying.

My tears today for my Grandmother Frances? Maybe it's just plain sad that a young woman died back in 1835 from complications following a miscarriage, leaving behind a four year old boy, never seeing him grow up to be a man, a father, a grandfather, and a great-grandfather himself. 

Life is splendid, raw, and searing if you feel anything at all. Breathing in, I love this life. Breathing out, I am all these people, forever and ever.

 

B is for Baby Birds

One day a friend from work dropped by unexpectedly. She handed me a Tupperware container. “Here,” she said, “I thought maybe you could do something with these guys.”

I cautiously pulled back the cracked plastic lid. Inside was a little nest with three naked, shriveled baby birds in it. My friend had found the nest in a tractor she’d borrowed the day before from someone who lived two long-apart towns over. “I found them this morning. I’m afraid I’ve moved them far away from their mother.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. I knew how futile this would be, but somehow, I just could not say no. I took the baby birds in my hand, not allowing myself to register how cold and still they felt. I put my hand under my shirt and pressed them to my skin. Sure enough in about five minutes they were squirming. Just barely, but enough to light something in me. Maybe they would live.

I made a new nest for them in a cardboard box and shone a desk lamp with a hundred-watt bulb on them for heat. I set about feeding them tiny bits of bread soaked in egg, offered on the tip of a toothpick. They ate. With every crumb that slide down one of their stringy little necks, I rejoiced in spite of myself. There was hope in this world after all.

This dunking bread into egg and feeding tiny gaping mouths was familiar ground for me. There had been many baby birds in my life: baby wrens, jays, crows, and a killdeer to name a few of the ones who made it to adulthood. There were just as many who did not.

When I was in high school my stepmother Janie and my Dad raised a baby owl. That’s even more illegal than raising baby songbirds, or even baby wrens. Whoever was the first to stumble into the kitchen in the mornings, pre-coffee, was greeted by the ravenous little hoot owl, who would open his mouth wide and make the most endearing and awful screeching until someone plopped some liver down his throat. We lived like criminals raising that little owl. After work, Janie and my dad would take the owl and disappear to friends’ houses until my brother and I were in bed. “If anyone’s looking for us, it’s better if you don’t know where we are. That way you don’t have to lie.”

I thought it was overkill until someone from the Department of the Interior managed to get Janie on the phone. He demanded she surrender the owl. “Look,” she explained, “I’m just raising this owl. As soon as it can fly, I promise, I’m giving it back to God.”

“Lady, that owl doesn’t belong to God,” he responded. “It belongs to the Unites States of America.”

Somehow we beat the USA, though, and raised that owl until he was ready to be released. As with all releases, it was bittersweet but beautiful to see him fly back into the tree tops.

All these memories flooded my brain like an easy balm as I tended these baby birds. Thinking back on the owl especially tickled a part of my brain that thrilled to have a baby bird in the house. Still, I stressed to our three young daughters that it was highly unlikely these little guys would live. “We’re doing it for the birds, not for us,” I reminded them as their eager faces peered into the cardboard box. “Be prepared. They will probably die,” I said over and over, but in my heart I recognized a tiny flame of hope.

In the morning I raced into the kitchen, desperately hoping to find three energetic little creatures hungrily awaiting their morning meal. Instead I found two very quiet birds, and one who was stone cold dead. Before anyone else woke up, I took it outside and quickly buried it behind the shed. Oh, the poor little thing. Brave little thing. Tiny, defenseless little thing. I pushed my sadness down.

I tended the other two with even more fervor, making sure they did not get chilled, and offering them food every few minutes. I stared at their odd little scrambled egg lips, which I found especially cute. “Eat,” I willed them. “Eat!”

“Will these two live?” the girls asked all too hopefully.

“Probably not, but it’s our job to do what we can, and keep them comfortable no matter what.” I felt a terrible responsibility to the mother bird, who doubtless was confused at finding her nest gone without a trace. I pushed the image of her, scraggly insect hanging out of her mouth, sitting on a nearby piece of machinery, panicked by her trustworthy bird instincts failing inexplicably, out of my mind.

The next morning I cautiously peeked into the box and lifted the small rag off the nest. Another baby bird had died. The last living bird lay resting its head on the dead bird’s body, huddling for warmth and finding none.

I tried not to think about it. They barely even had their nervous systems yet. They were fresh from the egg. You could see their veins through their skin. They were rubbery-necked still. They certainly had no attachments to sibling birds, no sadness, in their little brains.

I buried the second bird behind the shed next to its sibling.

I wanted the last one to live. I wanted him to wake me up at night squawking for food. I wanted him to poop all over the house while he learned to fly. I wanted him to sing and feather a nest. I wanted him to live high in the trees, to fly with his friends, to live free as…a bird.

“Let’s go see the bird guy,” I said to the girls. We piled in the car with the bird in the box and took him to our friend who is the local expert.

“No way,” our friend said. “These little insectivores are almost impossible to raise.” He took a little bug he had on hand, tore it apart, and tried to shove it into the baby bird’s mouth. The baby bird did not respond. “He doesn’t have the strength to swallow.”

The car ride home was very quiet.

At home, I just sat and held the bird. The thought of putting it back into its nest alone was more than I could bear. Eventually the tiny bird slowed and cooled and died in my hands.

In one forgiving bit of grace, the girls took it better than I did. I guess they believed all my warnings and assurances that the birds likely would not live. I’d worked hard to convince myself of the same thing. I knew all along the birds would probably die. But still. But still.

Back out to the shed I went, this time with the last little bird wrapped up in a paper towel. I dug his little grave, laid a rock over it, and bound two sticks together to make a cross for the three of them.

And then I cried.

I cried because their mother did not know what happened to them and I couldn’t tell her. I cried because I couldn’t save the baby birds. My chest heaved in heavy, choking sobs. I could not save the birds. I could not save my brother. I could not save anyone, not any anguished mothers and sisters and fathers and brothers. I could not even save myself.

I lifted my face to the darkening sky and cried because the world is sad.