About Crow's Pass

I was a chickadee, a Gen X kid on a bike
till the streetlights came on, calling to everyone.
Fifty kinds of birds understand a chickadee.
Everyone understood me.

Then a blue jay, loud and gorgeous,
who could do a hawk so well the yard went still.

At sixteen, a young wing broke.
I didn't see the break until twenty-one.
I learned to fly on it anyway.

I married young, like our girls did. I played the swan,
who often mates for life on shallow water.
I glided beautifully. It was never my water.

Then I became a mother, and that was real.
I raised my nuthatches, two very different colours:
my son, the big white-breasted, his loud yank heard by all;
my daughter, the small red-breasted, a tender tin-horn call.
Brilliant, talented, musical, both headfirst from the start.
Their father wasn't a swan. He was a phalarope,
where the male sits the eggs and raises the chicks,
and the female wears the brighter feathers.
He was a good, solid father. I needed more.
And me? I was the killdeer, fierce on the nest.
I knew how to play a broken wing; mine had never fully healed.
I led every danger away from my little ones,
and, a woman flying solo, raised them to run on their own.
I missed a few vultures along the way,
but I tried so hard to guard them, and I think I did okay.

After the divorce, at thirty-seven, I loved a Canada jay.
Canada jays nest in late-winter snow. A real bond,
a hard and stormy nest, and I held it together.
I mothered his two girls full time, an eider
whose creche gathers broods that aren't her own,
while my nuthatches came and went between two nests.

Thirty-eight to forty: a whole new hope.
Out on my own, I flew to the Dominican Republic
with my parents, to meet my brother's newborn.
Lighter, a tree swallow flashing blue-green in the sun,
all acrobatic twists. Men called me baby for the first time.
I loved it. I kept that new fire quiet. I'm a watcher.

At forty, I met a vulture. Five years.
Vultures soar high, watching the ground below.
He watched me and took; when he was done, I was a dead bird.

But I came back a cardinal,
red on purpose, impossible to miss.
I put on the dress. I danced. I knew exactly what I was doing.

Cardinals have pushed north for decades; I followed them
to Fort McMurray, where my life began again.
A cardinal never migrates. She stays
through the snow, dreaming of the sun.

Out west, the ravens and the eagles came at me.
I smoothed my feathers and held my branch.
So I became an eagle.
Eagles add to one nest for years, until it weighs two tons.
I built mine big. I survived the fire, and I went back.
I married a handsome, younger eagle from across the ocean.
Bald eagles live only here; he was never one.
He lost his footing soon after landing. I tried to lift him,
but I was settled on my two-ton nest, and he rode along.
He matched my energy, never my fire. Armour, but not enough.
Then COVID came, and still I held on.

Then Fort Mac gave me wings. Like the albatross,
who loops thousands of miles of open ocean
and still turns for home, I flew the world
alone, south to the sun, and came back golden.

Then came the change. Even cardinals molt;
by late summer some go ragged, bald-headed.
My pretty went quiet. The dancing stopped.
The walls got harder to break down.
The joy of that hard season: my nuthatches had nuthatches,
a new brood, every one different, and I love them dearly.

They called me just the bookkeeper. Fine.
Pretty women are easy to underestimate.
I read the balance sheets the money men couldn't,
and I watched everything.

Twenty years keeping their books straight,
then my house went: my nest, nearly everything.
I was the broken crow. The vultures circled again.
Vultures find what's falling by smell.

But a crow remembers a face for years,
and a crow family posts a sentinel
to call the alarm while the others feed and rest.
So I took the high branch, still looking good,
and built one great tree on land held in trust,
where no vulture feeds and every bird builds her own nest.
Since Crow's Pass, I'm born again. My albatross comes home,
this time to rest, to the same nest, year after year.

If you've flown some of this too, honey, come up.
There's room on the branch. We keep watch for each other.
Know me? Ask what bird you were when we met, and what I was.

This is the path to Crow's Pass.
No one crow can hold that balance alone.
We do it as a murder.

Community, not care.