Their People

I’m an ornithologist at Harvard

and, in case you haven’t heard,

birds are dying

in record numbers

and stray cats—

unhomed, unhoused, uncontrolled—

are to blame.

Animal Control suggests spraying them

with a garden hose

which I sometimes do out of desperation

(my partner is allergic so we can’t risk feline allergens

seeping in through open doors and window screens),

but I’m not a believer in

injuring cats

even if they’re loose

and causing trouble.

First, I try to figure out who owns them

so that I can return them

to their people

even if their people don’t deserve them

since they’ve failed to keep them safe inside.

At some point after Lydia arrives and once I realize she doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and might never leave—this is now the time period around which I frame everything—I begin copying my Small World “poems” into notebooks. It calms me. I copy them with my favorite black pens, the ones I use for work and the ones I used to use for my own work, a long time ago when I still wanted to be a writer. Bad teenage poetry and then some short stories in high school and college. Not to brag, but I showed promise. When I told my mother about my ambitions back then she said: I hope you’re going to tell important stories. Which was her way of saying, I hope you’re going to tell other people’s stories. Louise was an advocate, a solver of problems, a fighter for the rights of others. But I wasn’t that kind of person, and I wasn’t interested in becoming that kind of writer. I was too shy to knock on people’s doors and ask them questions they didn’t want to answer. And besides: I had my own problems. Someone had to advocate for me.

Making my Small World poems has become a kind of therapy, a form of silent meditation. Obviously I don’t show them to Lydia: in fact, I hide my habit from her, being careful to put my current notebook under another notebook in the drawer full of notebooks even though the notebooks are full of other people’s words, not my own, and don’t actually need to be hidden like my own writing would, if I even did it. Maybe my behavior is less about what I’m hiding and more about wanting to keep things hidden. Secrecy feels like power. And safety.

Writing these mini-stories down, collecting them in notebooks—these little problems in search of solutions—is a way to contain the anxiety of the people who originally wrote them. And my own. Because at a time when I thought my life would be settled—I’m a year away from turning fifty—I’m single again and engaged in a complicated and somewhat demanding rebound relationship: with my sister of all people. She’s not easy, and neither am I, but what I once wished for—reconnection with her, a do-over life with her in it, the friendship I hoped would develop if only we’d lived in the same place—is actually happening. Sort of. Sisterhood, like marriage, takes hard work. And, like marriage, both sisters have to really want to be in the relationship to stay together.