This is how we say I love you in my family:
“I stopped the truck to move two toads off the driveway last night.”
“The walking iris has three blooms on it today.”
“On my way to work, a fox crossed the road with a mallard in its mouth.”
It’s not that we don’t say the actual words. We do. A lot. But we also tell each other about these glimpses of flora and fauna because they matter to us. Now that my brother and I are adults with jobs and homes of our own, our family isn’t together as much, and trading wildlife tales helps us stay close. In addition to filling me in on work or how the skiing was, Travis will tell me about the black bear he saw while walking the dogs. Mom will describe a wren fending off a squirrel. Dad will tell me about the deer he spotted swimming in the lake.
My childhood home was in the woods, where my parents still live, and in adulthood my brother and I have sought out similar surroundings. I live with my husband, Paul, in rural Pennsylvania. We have a log cabin on seven acres bordering a creek and a farm, as much in the middle of nowhere as possible while still being close enough to airports and trains for work. Trav and his wife, Hadden, have a log cabin even deeper in the woods: they live in Wyoming and back up to a national forest. My brother and I are both lucky to have found partners who speak our language and will mark with us the first chipmunk emerging, first hummingbird returning, first fawns wobbling; the last bloom on the wood anemone, last leaf on the oak, last snow squall of the year.
I was blessed to have grown up with a father who jumped in lakes to catch and release snakes and snapping turtles, who pulled off the road to pick up roadkill because the dead fox was too beautiful to just drive by; with a mom who collected dead bugs and displayed them in clear plastic fishing-lure boxes, who let me bring every injured mouse and broken bird into the house.
When I was six, a huge, dead maple trunk—twelve feet tall and three feet in diameter—fell across the road in front of our neighbor’s house. When Dad arrived on the scene, the other neighbors said they had watched a raccoon repeatedly return to the trunk to carry each of her tiny babies from the nest she had built there. After she hadn’t been back for quite some time, Dad, who knew a thing or two about nests, scooped through the shredded duff inside the trunk and found, buried at the very bottom, a tiny raccoon, eyes still closed. This was before most wildlife rescues existed. Having no place else to take it, he brought it home.
For the first couple of days Ricky the raccoon struggled to feed, so Mom was up throughout the night trying to keep him alive. She worked her magic, and he soon learned to open his mouth to the formula-filled eyedropper.
I remember nestling into the corner of our itchy, green-plaid couch while Mom gently placed Ricky—swaddled in an old dish towel and smelling of sweet, wild musk—into my hands. She dribbled a few drops of formula on the back of my hand for Ricky to lick with his pink sandpaper tongue. We then moved to the eyedropper, and he sucked with his toothless mouth until he passed out from a full belly. As he slept, I felt his thrumming heart. I was in love.
His lids eventually opened to reveal polished obsidian eyes. I learned to lie on my back for his feedings so that he could practice taking wobbly steps with his padded hands and feet, like miniature versions of my own. He made his way across my chest to the upgraded doll’s bottle, then clutched my little-girl fingers, purring. I studied his miraculous ebony whiskers, his thickening fur and darkening mask and tail rings. Once he got his legs under him, he followed me and our black-Lab mix around the house. Curious about everything, he put his head in shoes and bookcases and toys. He started to chitter and play with me and Travis and the dog, but never the cat. That summer Trav, Ricky, and I splashed in our round plastic pool. Mom gave all three of us popsicles, and Ricky washed his delicate, intricate hands as he ate. Other days, we shared watermelons—none of us could get enough—then splashed in the pool to get the sticky juice off. It was as decadent a summer as any child could ask for.
Survival rates for orphaned wild creatures are low, but we were fortunate; Ricky grew strong. That fall Dad built a two-story wooden hutch for Ricky, and we left the door open so he could come and go as he pleased. Eventually he didn’t come back to his house, but Mom put fruits, vegetables, and mini marshmallows—his favorite—on a stand Dad had hammered onto an oak. The four of us, bundled in blankets, sat on the back-porch steps, and Dad whistled and Mom clicked her tongue to call Ricky. Many nights he returned and scarfed marshmallows and purred or chittered as we whispered our hellos back.
Our family’s enchantment with wildlife has helped us through our darkest days: my divorce, Trav’s grueling work schedule, Paul and Hadden’s tremendous losses of their parents.
The morning my father-in-law, Cal, died from an aggressive brain cancer, a bald eagle flew over his house. Seven years later we still receive texts from friends and relatives about their latest bald eagle sightings, and we feel Cal with us every time we see an eagle soar over our own creek.
A year and a half after Cal died, Dad was admitted to the ER for congestive heart failure. As soon as Paul and I arrived at the hospital, Mom began to fill us in on the doctors’ reports. Then she stopped. Her expression flattened. Her eyes darted around the small room beside the ER bays, and she said, “I’m not right.” Eyes flitting, she asked, “Where are we? Where’s Dad? Is he OK?”
I told her we were in the hospital and that Dad was being treated. “He’s OK,” I said, though I hadn’t heard enough to know if that were true.
Her questions continued, coming faster, and Paul went to find a nurse, who asked Mom if she had fallen. Mom couldn’t answer; she just kept asking the same questions on a thirty-second loop. She was admitted and placed two bays down from Dad.
In the hours that followed, Paul, Trav, Hadden, and I took turns answering Mom’s repeated questions and visiting Dad as he progressed through procedures, scans, and tests. In the storm of those first twenty-four hours, the one moment of calm came after Dad had finally been moved to the cardiac floor and we’d called in his belated dinner order from the heart-healthy menu. We fell into our old pattern, talking about the lake and what the fish were doing without us, about the turkeys he and Mom had seen on the drive down—topics that allowed us to temporarily ignore his heart monitor and oxygen levels, and that kept me from bawling and making things harder on him than they already were.
We were lucky, abundantly so. Mom’s “event” was an episode of transient global amnesia. It lasted about a day. And after the doctors took more than a quart of fluid off Dad’s lungs and prescribed a flock of drugs, more exercise, and a better diet, he largely returned to his energetic, strong self. Gratefully, we all could go back to fishing and hiking and watching the woods and the vast sky for glimpses of the wild world.
Nowadays the place we gather as a family is our thousand-square-foot lake cabin in the Ontario woods. Accessible only by boat, it’s not for everyone. There’s an outhouse instead of a bathroom, and there are more oared boats on the property than bedrooms. But it’s very much right for us.
Mom and Dad go up in June and share stories and photos all summer: the chipmunk that swam from the island, the tree frog in the gutter, the turtle nest near the flagpole. And then, finally, Trav, Hadden, Paul, and I arrive at the cottage too—the weeklong vacation we wait for all year. We wake to the sounds of the white-throated sparrow. We make coffee and watch the phoebes feed their hatchlings outside the kitchen window. We walk down to the dock, where the snakes bask on the rock pile and hummingbirds feed on Mom’s impatiens. We watch bass jump, kingfishers fly, and mergansers and beavers swim by. Noise and light pollution are almost nonexistent, and we leave the windows and doors wide open day and night, the outside nearly in, just the way we like it. Sometimes the loon calls are so loud and haunting that they work their way into our dreams.
It will be an entire week of sights: the fringed polygala, the humped bladderwort, the spotted salamander, the ebony jewelwing. It will all be more meaningful because we will experience these sights together in a place we know intimately.
Because sometimes we can’t talk about the hardest subjects: the unjust wars, the prejudiced policies, an exceedingly endangered planet. Neither can we talk about our own failures and regrets, nor the increasing number of loved ones lost, nor my parents’ aging bodies. Certainly not the multitude of ways we adore them and fear losing them. Those conversations cut too close to the bone. They snag in our throats. So instead our sightings plead: Please stay safe. Please stay whole and well.
Instead we talk about the loons feeding their baby, the mink sluicing into the lake, the nymph unfurling into a dragonfly. These stories say what we mean: that the world is full and round, filled with fervor and wildness, pulsing with fear and love, wingbeats and whispered devotions.
