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Several years ago when Violet first began taking bird surveys for the Coastal Alabama Audubon Society, she’d wake up ludicrously early on survey days, nervously checking and rechecking her small backpack to make sure she had everything she needed: binoculars and camera, clipboard with plenty of data sheets, three pens in case her first two ran out of ink, visor and official birding T-shirt. It was so important to her—this process of observing, counting, and monitoring the birds she’d loved for so long—that she grew shaky and nauseated. Oftentimes her anxiety was so bad that when she finally made it to the beach and the beginning of her route, her hands would tremble and the data she was supposed to collect would disappear as soon as she’d try to write it down.

It was different now, thank goodness. She’d learned to relax into it, to remember she was dealing with the natural world, where things didn’t always go according to plan. It wasn’t the plans she cared about anyway—the checklists and routines, the data sheets and computer logs—it was the birds themselves. Their effortless flight through the sky, the ease with which they changed course.

Even as a young child, Violet had watched everything from the tiniest blue-gray gnatcatchers with the squeaky calls to the white ibises and great horned owls that soared over her childhood home. Each species was different—Violet was able to identify most birds in her backyard by the time she was seven or eight years old—but they all had one thing in common: total freedom. Violet loved nothing more than to watch “her” birds, as she thought of them, calling and cackling, foraging and flying, all with the ease and freedom of a creature not bound by anything but the needs of its own little body and brain. Nothing stopped them. Watching them fly was always the balm she didn’t know she needed.

Today, after a breakfast of oatmeal and a handful of blueberries, she grabbed her trusty backpack—always stocked with the essentials to prevent the nervous checking of her earlier years—and drove south out of Sugar Bend toward the coast. Though the stretch of white sand fronting the Gulf of Mexico had been virtually empty when she was a girl, it was now lined with overpriced restaurants, trendy boutiques, boat-rental shacks, and tall glittering condos. But despite the constant forward motion of progress, the birds were still there, and it was Violet’s duty—and pleasure—to keep her eye on them.

She parked at the resort, as she always did, and passed between the two condo towers. She’d walked the path between these condos so often, she’d worn the grass down to sandy dirt, but the man in the resort’s guardhouse always looked the other way when she approached with her binoculars and camera around her neck, her wide green visor shading her face and neck from the unforgiving Alabama sun. A sign proclaimed this portion of beach reserved for “Registered Guests Only,” but it had been years since he’d asked for her room number. She’d even taught him a little about identifying the birds he saw flying past his windowed box by the entrance gate.