Brief Eden

For part of one strange year we lived in a small house at the edge of a wood. No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody to ask questions. Except for the one big question we went on asking ourselves. That spring myriads of birds stopped over briefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn to our leafy quiet and our brook and because, as we later learned, the place lay beneath a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks or crossed bills, birds small and enormous, all of them pausing to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings, and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we of a destination. By the time we’d watched them wing north in spring, then make an anxious autumn return, we too had pulled it together and we too moved into what seemed to be our lives.