Alex the Audubon

“Just try,” said Alex. “Please, Jen. Just try.”

I’d heard similar words many times, and from many people, over the last few weeks.

“Just try to get some sleep.”

“Just try to eat something.”

“Just try to get through the funeral.”

“Just try to speak to someone, Jen. You’ll feel better.”

Gems of advice offered to me by well-meaning friends who were gradually drifting away. And for that, I didn’t blame them. It becomes difficult to know what to do with a grieving widow in her late thirties. You can’t exactly invite her out for cocktails or Happy Hour, or set her up on a blind date. And it becomes exhausting just sitting around her conservatory, making cups of tea and small talk, and trying desperately hard not to mention James. So eventually you leave her alone, and hope that well-meaning text messages will suffice.

I didn’t mind their gradual abandonment. My grief was immense, I was better alone. I didn’t want to ‘talk it through’ or ‘get it out’, and I most certainly didn’t want to analyze it. I was happy to sit with it – literally. Most of my existence was spent in the cozy blue chair in the back conservatory, looking out at the empty garden, clutching mugs of tea, and enduring difficult thoughts crashing through my mind.

Alex, my most frequent visitor, could see I was isolating, shrinking. Worried that his grieving older sister was losing her mind while sitting alone in her silent conservatory, he suggested I try one of his favorite things in the world: feeding the birds in the garden.

“But there are no birds in the garden,” I said. “The only ones I ever see are those brown, pigeon-type things.”

“You mean mourning doves?” he said, excited to speak about birds.

“If that’s what they are, then yeah. Morning doves.”

“Well, once you get some bird food, you’ll get more than just mourning doves. You’ll see all sorts of wonderful critters out there. I guarantee it.”

“If you build it, they will come,” I said robotically, quoting the quote.

His long, thin head nodded slowly, and his index finger gently encouraged his round glasses to return to the top of his nose. “If you build it, they will come. Seriously, Jen. It could be something for you to do. I’m worried about you, sitting in here day after day. You miss James, I do understand that. But there’s nothing in here to give you any joy.”

“Jesus, Alex. I don’t want joy.”

“Not joy joy, but you know what I mean. A happy distraction. Remember how birds kind-of helped mom when she came to stay with Suzie and me after dad died? She’d sit outside for hours some mornings, just watching them.”

He forgot to mention that alcohol also ‘helped’ mom after dad died, and I chose not to remind him. But he was right: animals were a comfort to her back then. And staying with Alex meant she had many species to choose from. He and his wife, Suzie, own a smallholding so overrun with animals, James had often joked that he and I needed to get vaccinated any time we went there. In return, Alex called our boring garden “a graveyard not a back yard”.

I slowly shook my head, clutching my mug of tea. “Alex, I’m not like you, you know that. I don’t give a stuff about birds.”

He sighed. “I know, I know. But since James passed, you’ve done nothing. You won’t come stay me and Suzie, you won’t take one of our dogs for company. But you can’t just keep doing this,” he said, looking exasperated at his disheveled sister curled up in a chair.

“Look,” he continued, pacing the conservatory. “Imagine that the birds are East or West Coast elitists, who see your backyard only as a mere flyover state. Right now, there’s nothing to attract them. But give them something, and they’ll soon change their coastal elitist ways. Get it?”

I regressed to my teenage self and jokingly gave him the withering look that I’d give him almost daily during our childhood years. For reasons no one in our family could decipher, Alex became obsessed with birds. They were his love and his life. He read about them, wrote about them, stalked them, and talked about them. Constantly.

Given my childhood love of math, I was nick-named the number-cruncher while Alex was the gravel-cruncher, on account of his tendency to creep up and down our neighbors’ gravel driveways, hoping to catch sight of his favorite feathered beasts. Luckily most neighbors were more amused than annoyed by the street’s young Audubon.

I took no interest in his hobby back then. But now I was grateful for it, because it had made him comfortable with grief. His childhood bird obsession graduated to a general animal obsession, but when he graduated as a vet, it thrust him into the world of sick and dying animals and their grieving, distraught owners. His bedside manner was natural, comforting. When the end came for man or beast, Alex saw it as a sad but necessary part of life.

But he knew not everyone dealt with grief that way. He could see I needed a distraction, and for him, birds were the greatest distraction of all.

He stopped pacing and sat down opposite me in James’s old and battered leather chair – an eyesore but a keepsake from James’s student years, something to remind him to “never forget what it’s like to be poor.”

I looked past Alex, out into our garden. He was right: it contained nothing of any interest for an animal - just a patio, the obligatory picnic table and chairs, then an acre of tidy grass with random trees hugging the fences. Neither James nor I was green-fingered – my nails were too long; James’s patience was too short. In the summer we hired a local gardener to mow, in the winter we left it to itself. We planned to one day fill it with children, but in the mean time we were happy enjoying each other and our careers. A drunk driver erased all that in seconds.

Alex saw me losing attention, staring into nothing. He tried to bring me back by excitedly saying something about migratory birds, and the fact we were approaching spring. And then, more quietly: “Just try. Please, Jen. Just try.”

In the weeks that followed, his subtle ‘please-feed-the-birds’ campaign began. First, via a daily text message - a picture of a colorful bird, accompanied by a message: “I’d sure love to be in your backyard right now, munching on yummy bird food. Watching me would bring you hours of endless fun! Why? Beak-ause I’m awesome!”

He then tried a different tactic: leaving gifts on my doorstep. A 20kg bag of wild bird food, then a large pair of scissors with a gift tag, on which he’d written: “Use me to open bird food!”

Two days later, a wide chunk of a tree stump appeared on the doorstep, along with a handwritten note:

“Put me in your garden,

Sprinkle seeds on me.

Then birds they will arrive,

And fill you with some glee!”

Lifting the stump wouldn’t be wise. My biceps hadn’t seen a dumbbell in weeks, and my Pilates-starved lower back was stiff and sore. So I closed the front door, climbed the stairs, and returned to the safety of bed.

It was the following day when Alex gave up on his subtle bird-feeding campaign and took matters into his own hands - quite literally. He scooped up the tree stump with his long, strong arms and strode out to the garden. Then, after gathering up the other doorstep gifts, he transformed the garden into a miniature bird café.

My involvement in the project was to sit, watch, and hug a mug of tea.

He positioned the tree stump where I could see it from my cozy blue chair and sprinkled a healthy dose of seeds on top of it, around it, and along the garden path. He’d brought with him a tube-shaped wire-mesh hanging thing, which he filled with bird seeds and hooked onto a tree, and a small bowl, which he filled with water and placed near the picnic table.

For a man who’d built his own smallholding from scratch, a backyard bird-feeding project was no big deal. But still, he stood back, hands on hips, admiring his handiwork.

“There,” he said. “I now declare The Critter Café open!”

He instructed me to leave out some fresh seeds daily, preferably before 7am. I raised an eyebrow, hugged him wearily, and he left, off to feed his own hungry menagerie.

Two days later, a package arrived – a small Jiffy bag containing a brand-new copy of the Reader’s Digest Book of North American Birds. The typed gift note said: “For when you want to know the names of all your new feathery friends at The Critter Café. Love u, sis! A xxx”

I stared at the large, piercing eyes of the front-cover owl and sniffed the pages, seeking comfort from that new-book smell. Then I placed the book on the coffee table and returned to my chair.

My days were still things to endure, things to get through. But on one particular day, I noticed that I was noticing.

First, it was a sparrow-type bird. Nervous and quick, it swooped down onto the tree stump one afternoon, twitched its tiny head to check for danger, picked up a seed, then flew away. The whole processes lasted mere seconds but was repeated again and again.

Then it was as if that sparrow-type bird told his friends there was a new joint in town; within days, the garden had become the venue for a continual commotion of birds.

There were tiny blue-and-black ones, quick and busy brown ones, a squawking blue creature, something that looked like an overgrown humming bird, and the brown, pigeon-type things, which now hung around for longer. Sometimes they all squabbled, resulting in a high-pitched chirping frenzy and mid-air fights. But most of the time they happily dined together, their heads nodding in unison.

I didn’t know their names, nor did I wish to know. But eventually they became more than just background noise - they became a reason to get out of bed. But still, Alex was right: it was some sort of routine.

After sprinkling fresh seeds around the garden, I didn’t accomplish much else each day and my thoughts were just as difficult, only now they were interrupted by the distraction of birds.

One emerged as my favorite – a bright-red confident thing with a serious, tiny black face and mohawk haircut. Most days he’d sit alone, high up in the pine tree closest to the conservatory, his bright color a beautiful contrast against the deep green. It was as if he found comfort just being near the food. He’d swoop down occasionally for a bite, but then back to the tree, feathers fluffed.

Who was he, and what was he doing? Digesting? Observing? Contemplating?

I glanced down at the coffee table, to the owl’s piercing eyes staring at me from the front cover.

I leaned forward, put down my tea, and picked up the book.