Hello Loves,
In Chicago, some of us have weather superstitions that pertain only to spring. “Don’t plant your garden until after Mother’s Day,” we tell newcomers, “don’t put away the shovels until after Mother’s Day, don’t swim until Memorial Day when the lifeguards come back to the Lake Michigan shore and the worst of the cold water has faded.”
At my house, I haven’t planted, or put coats away, not yet. Just this morning I moved the shovels to just outside the little room off the back of the house that we call the shed. Not inside the shed, mind you, because I will not tempt the Gods of Snow.
This year it feels like a hollow habit. We had a very warm and nearly snowless winter. The spring came early, leaving me cross and worried, even as the tulips I’d planted for Andy put on a show the likes of which I’d never seen. By my birthday in late April, the lilacs were in full riot, very early.
But, hollow or not, the shovel stays out.
The only reason that I moved it from the tiny landing on our back stairs outside the kitchen is that there is a mess on that landing that I wish to preserve even more than the Snow Gods ritual. I have a robin and he is building a messy, deconstructed nest that has scattered dried grass and twigs all over that landing, and the work he is doing is so sacred that I would prefer the shovel not be in the way.
I don’t mean that I have robin in that in have domesticated a bird. Rather, our garden, small and urban though it is, has a resident bird that chose us.
This robin, a skinny male that I now know on sight, has come back every year for three years. I can track him because he showed up in the second year of the pandemic, and was then, as now, a spark of optimism. I can also track him because his arrival is the same each year, heralded by his desire to build a nest.
He’s chosen a bad spot, to be honest, an equally skinny support beam for our stairs and second floor porch. Not wide enough for a proper nest, ill-fitting. He has always been prone to scattering that long dried grass all over our landing and stairs. He is often visible sitting on our electrical supply wire, probably doing construction math in his head, wondering how he’ll make it work this year at last.
We live in a standard building for Chicago—a worker’s cottage. These majority wooden structures went up just before and just after the Great Chicago Fire to house the laboring class. They can be a single story, but many were dormered or expanded. Some sit with their first floors below street level, caught in the city’s miraculous and massive public works effort to lift its structures and infrastructure between four and fourteen feet above its original placement with its feet sunk in the swamp.
Out house was built in the 1880’s, when Logan Square was a ring suburb of a Chicago only a decade out from the fire. Our neighborhood, now resolutely part of the city proper, was then called The Village of Pennock. In the decades since, this block has seen a lot of workers, first Polish, then LatinX, now a combination of both with a rapidly increasing influx of affluent whites and people of all races coming in to create the new city being born by the Silicon Prairie.
Andy got this place cheap and by sheer luck in the worst of the housing market downturn twelve years ago. Dex and I moved in four years later. The house was once broken up into three apartments, and the back stairs remain (along with three electric company accounts) as a reminder of its long history of housing workers. The owners before us began to slowly make it into a single family home. We have kept up that work, turning the upstairs kitchen in what was the top apartment into a bedroom. But we haven’t rebuilt or reimagined the stairs yet, and they have quirks, like that skinny beam unfit for nesting.
Still, the robin comes back every year. And every year he drops more grass on the porch than he puts in his nest. And every year he’s convinced in the end that it just won’t work and moves on to try somewhere else. Every year I think, I should give him a little shelf to help out, and every year, by the time nesting season has concluded, I haven’t managed to organize it.
This year, the bird and I have had a chat. I was in the garden clearing brush, and he sat on the edge of our vegetable bed and spoke to me directly. He chirped, and I told him we’d get it sorted this year. He chirped again to make sure I heard him, and I reassured him. Then he caught my eye and flew up to his spot to show me what he wanted, and I reassured him again. Finally he chirped very loudly and flew away. “I’ve got you,” I yelled after him.
My mission was clear. Our handywoman is on the case. And even if this year we don’t finish in time for him to build his nest, it will be waiting for spring a year from now.
At the moment, spring a year from now is impossible to imagine.
In a year, Dex will be in finals at the college he hasn’t even started yet. We are spending this spring waiting for acceptance letters and financial aid packages and talking about September. This spring Andy is accepting his own offer of admission to a low residence graduate program in Labor Studies back in my hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts. This spring, I am proofreading and approving the interior copy of both my books as they march towards their release dates in October and January. Every one of those paths leads away from the routine of our family life, and away from the nest.
Last week, I was Dex’s plus one at a Volunteer Appreciation Party at the Field Museum. We watched volunteers be recognized for their service, including one person who had been at the museum for fifty years. At the dinner table in the Stanley Field Hall, taxidermied elephants next to us, we spoke to a mother and son who were likewise a volunteer and a plus one. The son was about to leave the city for an anthropology job out west. The mother was joining the Peace Corps and moving to Madagascar. “I might as well have my own adventure,” she said.
I’ve thought a lot about the empty nest we’ll have in the fall. And I’ve adopted a phrase I heard somewhere, an open nest. This means that you tell your kids that the house where they were raised is and always will be theirs. They can come and go as their lives unfold into adulthood with no sense of failure to launch if they need time to gather themselves up before big change or big moves or next schooling. It means openness to change and to the ways that change can take years and years to be safe.
As a Gen Xer I didn’t have an open nest. I left home at eighteen for college and my parents downsized and there wasn’t anywhere for me to come back to. Poverty made that a certainty, as did my father’s illness that I was helping to manage. But even without those constraints, I was like most of my peers, out as soon and as permanently as I could manage.
Subsequent generations have had more enforced flexibility, of course, and I am sure that Xers raising Zs have something of a hangover from our accelerated adulthood that we don’t want to inflict on our kids. I want the nest to be open, with the door swung wide so Dex can take jobs, go to sea, head off to grad school, figure out a path, and simply rest from the work of joining the big world.
I would love the nest to open for me too.
I will launch both books in the first year of Dex’s away-at-college life. By spring of 2025, the books will both be born, and in the world, alive and with paths of their own that I can’t control very much. It is glorious to think about, and overwhelming and so lucky. And as they move through the world, so will I. There will be some kind of book travel, events, conversations, rooms of friends and strangers.
And so here we all are, in our deconstructed, reconstructed cottage, in the process of deconstructing and reconstructing the nest that has held us all so safely through these days of war and pandemic and early spring and fear and optimism.
I’m practicing my launch in little ways. I may even plant some flowers before Mother’s Day. On Thursday, I bought myself a new lipstick, and on the way between one errand and another, I felt the urge deep in my bones to walk barefoot on the sand, to put my feet into my beloved lake, to stand in the early sunshine, even if it made me existentially uneasy, and bask for just a moment in the good feeling of warmth on my skin and cool water on my toes.
I drove to a parking lot on the lakeshore, a random one, and parked and took off my shoes and walked the long beach to the water. I passed families, and people in bathing suits eating lunch, and a father watching his toddler son practice walking in the sand, practice falling and getting back up. I stood in the water and looked at the horizon and the people swimming before Memoiral Day, and rested in the moment. It was wonderful, even though it was early.
And here, this morning, back at home, is the dried grass on my back steps, the evidence of the messy beauty of the project of launching ourselves. It will ask us to try so many new things. It will have us, like the robin, reimagining our home, building it and rebuilding it over years, requiring the help of someone to create space to grow. We may have to move the snow shovels to make it happen, even if we are superstitious and don’t yet put them in the shed.
Here we are, getting ready to fly.
I’ll write soon.
Love,
Eiren
I HATE THE TERM SILICON PRAIRIE! BANISH IT! I love you though and all the rest of this.
This is all so familiar. Launching my second soon and cherishing the third home for a bit longer. I’m a plus one today, though location will be less elephanty. So different to co-create these times of transition in new ways than we lived through. xx