Journal entry, 4/21/92 housesitting at Simone and Toni’s, Bluebird morning

4/21/92 I am housesitting at Simone and Toni’s, it’s a blessed escape from the clutter of my house for someone else’s clutter. I’m escaping the distraction of my creepy new neighbor. So many wonderful places to write, but the dog won’t leave me alone. How I hate to be pestered in the morning. So I tossed the cat out. The dog circles me every minute in the house. Toni probably walks her each morning.

All the outside chairs face towards the house. I don’t want to look inward, I want the horizon. First year of decent rains after several seasons of drought, the oatgrass is reaching skyward. Too bad the hot tub is broken, I could spend part of each day submerged in this beauty. Yesterday I managed to complete my CPITS end of year report, divvying out matching money etc.

Yesterday I awoke to bluebirds banging on my window, striking the glass. All that extraordinary blueness of sky and rust colored bellies. I read once that most of bird feathers are optical prisms. It’s a question of refracted light, not a pigment. Their blueness is ethereal. I cannot imagine mere pigment entering into it. No matter what I did, those two bluebirds dove at the window. I darkened the blinds. Nothing worked. I realized that the window was a mirror and the pair were defending their territory against themselves. They were their own worst enemy.

I remember seeing bluebirds when I was young making that visual comparison with time. I used to confuse them with robins, both with their red breasts. I thought they were related, Or that they were the girls. Then came Rachel Carson’s silent spring.

And since then I’ve seen bluebirds twice in my life. Once, years ago in Chico, I rode horseback in a meadow on John Crawford’s red mare, Bluebirds swooping over me. another time out near Bridgeport with Lee Perron, we were hiking and came across a little upland meadow stretched between the framework of hills. The bottom of a gully, really, like those hanging basket lakes of the Sierras. And there they were filling the air with their blue loveliness. They took my breath away as they do each time I see them, because they have been such rare birds in my life. It’s like a glimpse back into my childhood.

I’m always searching for lost memories to mine, as if my inarticulate memories, layered beneath  years of time and neglect, held some basic truths. Finding that, I find a part of myself. I have no way of knowing which thoughts are pure, the innocent observations, without form or structure, or these gleaned from the nuances of an educated mind. Certainly they are more sophisticated.

But the purity of bluebird magic, that breathlessness occurs only in hindsight, using the sophisticated tools of language, I search for a way to describe what I must’ve felt that isn’t a cliché. Bluebirds reduced to cliché, associated with happiness, fill me with inexplicable joy and I don’t know why, other than the invisible link to my past, their disappearance for years, until I forgot I ever saw bluebirds.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s before I saw them again. 25 years I waited for them, I looked for them, not finding them anywhere. 25 years I searched for joy, and found other birds commonly filling the air. A bluejay is cousin to the crow, not a songbird. They knife the air with their coarse call, only in flight do they embellish and scallop it.

I do not know the song of the bluebird, but in my darkest hour, a student wrote a poem, the song of the bluebird to the explosion of the bomb, darkness is fleeting, light is eternal. How could she know of such things in fifth grade? Even she doesn’t know their song, though she writes of it.

The bluebird holds some evocative mystery, though its very name seems clichéd, but if we rename the bluebird, some of the mystery would be lost, we’d have to reinvent it. How did this bluebird become linked with happiness? its song, its color, its habitat, harbinger of spring, Sentinel of joy, diving at my window.

Arise, arise, it is day, don’t squander the preciousness of it, the metaphor seems to say. But it was really just two feisty birds defending their own turf from strangers. Territorial imperative and delusion, the urge to nest, the urge to mate, to raise young is of primal concern. Delusion and joy, seeking something irrefutably lost, was it ever there. Joy is subtle if you look at it head on, it disappears, only the absence of joy heightens it when it comes. Like those bluebird feathers, the illusion of blue, of joy as seen from the corners of the eye and never head on.

This morning I came looking for the bluebirds and found only a disappointment of barn-swallows instead.