Fledgling

I learned recently that when you’re a fledgling, you learn to fly from the ground, in a hidden spot, and not from the nest you were hatched in. What happens is you hop and you hop, and you might make it to a tree’s lower branches, or onto the sturdy part of a hedge.

You’ll fall a lot.

I always assumed that when it was time to fly you were high in the tree, your wings twitching with anticipation and also fear, and your mom was standing by ready to push, as a mom does in a mixture of gentleness and strength that moves you to step out and spread your wings.

Turns out, I don’t think the mother has much to do with it. Turns out, the mother is off building a new nest. The father brings food to the fledglings while the mother collects twigs and leaves and whatever else is needed to build another home now that her baby birds are learning to fly.

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Jesse and I spent an afternoon building a garden. I didn’t want a garden. I thought they were tacky. I wanted a waterfall. Something small that emptied into a pond with goldfish in it. Instead, Jesse and I went to the Farmer’s Market one Saturday morning and picked out basil, mint, mojito mint (who knew?), oregano, cilantro, tomato, and pepper plants. It was the first time we’d been to the Farmer’s Market since the pandemic hit, and it was the first time we went without kids and I remembered my domestic dream of spending Saturday mornings picking out sunflowers and veggies for the week, and sure, a free-range chicken for that night’s dinner. I would know the farmers by name. They would ask me about my writing and also how learning to knit was going, and there would be a blue grass band playing in the background singing about heartache but in a way that makes Saturday morning vivid and everyone smiles at each other because the melody is good and true.

“I want to do this every Saturday,” I told Jesse while carrying a bag of apple cider donuts in one hand and a turquoise carton of strawberries in another. I love those torquoise cartons. I vow to do something with them every time I bring them home.

We built the garden on a Sunday afternoon and truth be told, Jesse is the one who tends to it. I think we’re supposed to water it every other day, and I think we’re supposed to do something about the tomato plants that have grown to Jack and the Beanstalk proportions. I learned that if cilantro begins to bloom – little white flowers that quiver on already quivering green strands of stalks – that it’s turned into coriander, and who knew cilantro could become something else entirely?

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Hadley and Harper are almost as tall as me. They are all legs and torsos and beach hair and blue eyes and I walk outside in the evenings to pick basil for bruschetta or pesto or to put on top of pizza and I wonder how the fledglings got to the ground in the first place.

Basil is wild. We have so much of it, and Jesse is using the word “harvest,” and I think we’ll need a bigger fridge and I stack the leaves up, roll them together then slice while I think about the mama bird. When did she know it was time for her babies to learn to fly into the world? When did she know to build a new nest?