Biscuits from the Edge #2
Swallows and breadcrumbs
I leave a breadcrumb trail this time, and not the edible kind.
I made that mistake last time. I strew tasty morsels behind me, clues to help me find my way back, but the bloody squirrels must have ate them.
Actually … I bet it was the crows.
A mischief whichever way.
So, this time, I came prepared.
***
But first. The swallows.
It is a sadness … we are all very sad about it. Not the new roof. No, the new roof is a happy thing. Before it became new, it was old … tired and torn and the storm accelerated its demise.
But the swallows. We are sad about them.
***
The swallows returned. They do it every year. Five thousand miles, mostly ocean. How they navigate without google maps is beyond me, but then navigation was never a ‘core skill’.
I never did have a homing instinct. Hence the breadcrumbs.
Which incidentally, failed.
Anyway, the swallows. They came home. Nested in the eaves as they always have.
And then the roof came off.
Catastrophe.
***
But wait, before I lament the dislocation of the swallows, I must tell you that I thought long and hard about what to replace the breadcrumbs with.
Paper was the obvious first choice. Sufficiently inedible and suitably compostable. Paper adorned with words felt apt. And for a while I landed here.
But it didn’t quite fit and I let it rest awhile. In the morning I awoke and I just knew.
***
The roof came off on account of a wind.
When I say wind, I don’t mean just a strong blow. No, this was an especially vigorous one. It ripped out roots of ancient trees, tore roofs clean off buildings and sent the fear of god into us as we sheltered in our rickety houses. It blew and it blew and then, in the morning, an eery peace settled across the land and we surveyed the damage.
The barn roof was damage. Torn and bestrewn …. it remained … but in parts. And most of those parts were not where they were supposed to be.
Hence the current re-roofing activity. But that’s not where I am going here.
The swallows. Dislocated. Confused. Visibly agitated.
It’s an upsetting thing to see, a swallow returning to roost when the roost is no more. Confusion abounds. A panicked flittering ensues and the scene is one of disorientation.
I swam across oceans vast to arrive here … spent months on the wing …. and now this?
Okay, so maybe the panic belongs to me, I’ll own that, but there is disturbance in the wing and shriek of a dislocated bird. That cannot be denied.
***
In the morning, what came to me was this.
Wait, let me set the scene a little.
Sunday morning. Early wake-up (too early to get out of bed on a Sunday morning). A tea in bed … mellow tunes …. a hot water bottle nestled in the small of my ever-so-slightly-sore back. And what moves through me is this.
Breath.
This endless stream of in and out, the ongoing exchange between what’s ‘in here’ with what’s ‘out there’.
As ‘Aha moments’ go, it wasn’t especially dramatic, but it landed with certainty.
My trail is my breath! Of course it is. Wherever I go I leave parts of myself in my wake. Probably I leave more than just my exhalations, but the breath is way more poetic than dead skin cells and other human detritus.
You see, I have come to notice that finding my way back is rarely, if ever, about retracing my steps. If it were that simple, the paper trail would do.
Finding my way back is something entirely different. It’s a long journey, across oceans, to arrive at a familiar place.
It is rarely straightforward, of that I can be sure, and no matter how particular I am in laying my trail, it rarely leads me directly to my destination. Like flying five thousand miles to the barn, and then a few weeks later returning from a brief foray only to find the roof has gone.
I flap and I shriek.
What to do, what to do?
***
The new barn roof is looking splendid; you might like to know.
And as for the swallows, I cannot say this with complete certainty, but anything that can travel five thousand miles, weeks on the wing, not once, but twice a year, is probably pretty apt at adjusting its course.