Bird in the Willow

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Photo: Julia Melnyk

Yester­day, when I looked through my kitchen win­dow, I saw a strange-looking bird sit­ting on a branch of the wil­low tree in our back­yard. I went to my study to get the cam­era, but by the time I got back to the win­dow the bird was gone. I closed my eyes and tried to visu­al­ize it, then I found a book on birds in Alberta, but that bird was not in it. I went out­side, walked around the tree, and looked all over for a feather. If I find a feather, I thought, I can recon­struct the whole bird. 

But there was no feather, no bird drop­pings, noth­ing. That bird was gone for good, and although it was small, the empti­ness I sud­denly felt inside me was huge. So I sat under the wil­low tree think­ing that there was no bet­ter place in the world to feel sad. Willows, I thought, are sym­bols of sad­ness and their hang­ing branches are like the long hair of maid­ens cry­ing above deep water. There’s no water in our back­yard, just our old con­crete garage. A long time ago the wil­low tree was planted too close to the garage and now it’s push­ing against one of the cor­ners. The main trunk has already grown around that cor­ner, and from a cer­tain angle it looks like the wil­low is devour­ing the garage. 

The wil­low has six trunks. It is too big, we were told by the arbor care peo­ple, and it should be cut down or trimmed down to two trunks. When we moved into this house, the tree had ten trunks. In the last five years we have had four of them cut: two were grow­ing too close to the roof of our house, and the other two threat­ened to fall onto tele­phone and hydro lines. That means, I thought under the wil­low, that it’s los­ing one trunk each year. In six years, I thought, there will be no trunks left; only a huge stump will remain. And I pic­tured myself sit­ting there, and I remem­bered Shel Silverstein’s book The Giving Tree, the sad­dest book in the world, and I felt like cry­ing a lit­tle, but I told myself that I shouldn’t cry because our neigh­bours could see me, and I never, ever cry in front of neigh­bours. My mother always thought that men should not cry; only weak men cry, she would say, and weak men are not men any­way. On the other hand, the Four Seasons had a hit song many years ago, “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” So, who does cry? Small girls and weak men? My mother didn’t cry; she was tougher than many men, my father included. As for him, his eyes would fill with tears every time he heard an unpleas­ant weather fore­cast. I am some­where between them, and if there is a gene for cry­ing, I inher­ited half of it from each of them. In other words, I am nei­ther strong enough nor weak enough, just like a willow.

Willows are dan­ger­ous, the arbor care men told us, because their branches and trunks break eas­ily, so when strong winds blow out­side, we shouldn’t stand under them. But there was no wind the day I saw that bird; there was only that ter­ri­ble feel­ing of empti­ness and loss when it dis­ap­peared, as if the world were out of bal­ance. It is strange, isn’t it, that such a small event, appar­ently unre­lated to us, has so much influ­ence over our beings, touch­ing us some­where deep inside and per­haps chang­ing us forever. 

I closed my eyes again but the image of the bird had com­pletely dis­ap­peared from my mem­ory. Soon, I thought under the wil­low tree, noth­ing would remain of that bird. No his­tory, I thought, would record its flight and the way it had landed on a branch of the wil­low tree in our back­yard. No his­tory would record the sad­ness I felt when I real­ized that the bird had gone, although that’s what this world is made of, and it doesn’t mat­ter whether you see it as fic­tion or non-fiction, as an invented story or a real account. There’s always some­thing that’s not included, some­thing that remains, and that small thing is what all sto­ries are about, includ­ing this one, if this one is a story at all.