Trying To Make It Home

When I arrived home from work, I fed the dogs and was puttering around the house, doing a few chores, when our small dog began woofing.

Not barking, but woofing. A soft, short woof that she likes to utter particularly when she’s perturbed at something. When the woofing went on for more than a few seconds, I went to investigate. What I saw was this:

A little rabbit, seeking shelter from the rain that had just started blowing in, was trying to make friends with our dog through the glass door. Our dog woofed a few more times, but she seemed content to mostly just sit and stare at the rabbit who was staring back at her. After a while, the rain stopped and the little creature ambled away, probably lured by the watermelon rinds I put out for the possums.

Over the weekend, my wife and I drove to a nearby town to buy groceries and pick up a few essential supplies. The route we used was a serpentine mountain highway that loops through green glades, along burbling creeks, past farms and ponds and fields filled with every kind of livestock from Black Angus cattle to Muscovy ducks. It’s too twisty a road to call a “relaxing” drive, but it has a shaded placidity to it, and tends to calm jangled nerves just by feeling the miles spool away behind us as we traveled along it.

Along the way, we noted the number of large turtles crossing the road. They tend to crane their leathery necks up, watching as the cars roar past them, and I can never tell if they’re nervous or just curious. Perhaps they’re hostile, in the “You kids get off my lawn!” vein of hostility. You humans get off my road! Usually when we see the little boxy things on the road, we’ll stop and move them across to the side of the road where they’re heading so that they don’t get pancaked by inattentive or sadistic drivers. But this stretch of road is far too dangerous for such altruism. Too many blind spots too close together and no shoulder on which to park safely. Stopping the car to run back and portage a reptile would almost guarantee a major collision within a minute. So…we said little prayers for the turtles and left them to whatever was coming.

I am prone to periods of deep melancholy, and yesterday was one of those days. Near sunset, I went outside to replenish bird feeders and look at the sky. The sounds of the day were dimming down, and I felt that familiar homesick feeling — the Welsh call it hiraeath — that sends an inexpressible longing for something unnamed through my spirit. It’s an odd thing, really…a sense of the awareness of suffering in this life, the absolute inevitability of suffering…and a gradual, almost pleasurable increase in the certainty of suffering. With age comes a curious degree of resolute reality, and when that reality accrues in the rafters of one’s mind — as it is accruing in mine — a thoughtful man realizes that he has expended a staggering amount of his life dreading and trying to avoid suffering. And all for nothing. All that effort, all that planning and dodging and strategizing, and then one day he stands in the damp grass of his back yard while his dogs writhe in joy on their backs and he realizes that he is as exposed to pain as he is to the suspended ceiling of sky.

And at such moments, all he can really do is watch the world around him, with all its actions and inhabitants.

Yesterday near sunset, I stood and watched, and in a little while, a trio of hummingbirds made themselves known to me. Two males and a female. One of the males perched on a lariat of honeysuckle and watched, sometimes making that squeaky little chikety-chikety-chikety sound of which I am so fond. The female stationed herself atop a trellis, her little head following the movements of the large male like a conductor with a baton. And what movements they were.

Dressed in his iridescent tuxedo and cummerbund, the male rose into the fading light, dropped, swung, lifted, back and forth, his flight path describing a smile in the darkening air. The other male tried to supplant him a time or two, but the natty fellow held his own and held the female’s attention. As the light slipped away from June 23rd AD 2019 forever, the three hummingbirds arrowed across the yard, headed for the trees around front.

I stood for a while where I was, replaying the act of pure life-joy that I’d witnessed. I thought of the baby hummingbirds that will be born in coming weeks and I wished again that I could see — just once — a hummingbird nest in the wild with its clutch of Tic Tac-sized eggs. I thought of the current year, already halfway to its implacable winter doom.  I called the dogs and turned to make my way back to our little farmhouse. And as I walked, I thought of my wife’s words, spoken earlier in her soft, earnest tones when we had been talking about the turtles on the road. We had seen one on our return trip, crushed and dead on the edge of the blacktop. My wife looked at me when she saw that I’d noticed the turtle.

“All he was doing was trying to make it back home,” she said.

There it is. Nothing more complicated than that. The source of my homesickness, my melancholy, my hiraeth. The knowledge that all I’m doing is trying to make it back home.

~ S.K. Orr