Yesterday, though it is October and cooling, the sun was bright overhead and we got in our two beach walks. A huge broken V of birds flew south so fast we were not able to identify the species. Not Canada geese, who fly slower and in a tidier skein and honk. Gary suggested cormorants.
The juvenile gulls have mostly begun foraging for themselves, but we still see the occasional young bird begging its mother for food. The young gulls are fully fledged and as big as their parent, but still in dull gray child’s clothing. They duck their heads into their bodies, circle their parent and peep: “Feed me! Feed me!”
The pelicans, too, seem to have fully grown children still in baby plumage, though these larger birds have more dignity, stately in size.
Hild by Nicola Griffith of Seattle is a novel about Saint Hilda, an ancient woman, who begins in this telling as a three year old. Her life is at risk, and she has been warned: Quiet mouth, bright mind. She is to listen and connect all she observes and throughout her precarious early life, she attends those around her with power: to the words of powerful people, to the scent of boggy land and new-turned earth and blossoms. She hears how the winds rattles leaves and the rustle and tuck of creatures in the wild.
Hild flies with eagles. This is not so much magic—this is medieval history, not fantasy—as wisdom. Hild connect dots in the air that no one else pays the slightest attention to. She misses things, but her seeing is not represented as a magical gift, but as the result of her openness to everything around her. She is smart and strong and very tall at a time when these qualities were often confused with the right to power. Hild seeks the pattern, sees it build and twist and turn, looks for ways to use it to advantage, both her own for the sake of weaker folk.
Times have not changed so much. We still confuse size with virtue. And even now there are people seeking a pattern to how the world changes.
There was a royal wedding, my husband tells me, and people were complaining about the cost. In Crazy Rich Asians there is an insanely expensive wedding too, but at least in the latter fictional case, the parents were supposed to have done something to earn the price. I always cry at weddings, and I even cried during that fictional one. I cried at my own wedding, which cost only a couple of hundred dollars including my dress and the gold I bought to make our rings.
I was young when I married, but Gary and I paid for the ceremony. We were already past begging our parents to feed us.
These days I think it would have been nice to have a friend who threw me a bridal shower, a father-in-law who paid for a pre-wedding banquet, a mother who insisted on all the trimmings and paying for them. But these are things I did without quite happily at the time. And they would be distant memories now, less valuable that the dress still wearable though folded away. There is no genuine regret. It was a lovely weeding in my parents’ back yard under the pagoda tree.
Seasons pass and time gathers itself in lumps of memory. How I laughed from excitement during the ceremony. How my new husband wrapped me in his arms. How our grins made our teeth click ever so gently at that first married kiss.
The parent has already provided a crab meal—stripped clean here—and walks away. However it strives to appear small and dependent, it’s time for this gull to grow up.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 