The migration won’t peak for another month or so. Windswept and chill these days are and a little patience brings a reward, like glimpsing the swans that flew overhead the other day just before sunset.
We don’t startle swans when they are so high above us, unlike the finches and sparrows we so easily upset and frighten with our shadows. Twice now we’ve had the pleasure of hosting pine siskins, a bird quite unafraid of us. They seem to delight in being seen and admired, not terribly unlike ourselves. They are guests who delight in being guests, and know the pleasure of their visit is sweetened by both its rarity and brevity. We should be so wise.
The trees in which the birds perch migrate as well. We always think of trees as stationary but they move just as surely as humans or anything else. The great conifers of the Pacific Northwest all, or almost all, hail from a region in Western China. The apple and peach, they too, come to us after taking long hikes far from their original Asian homes.
“Home,” an old friend and great wanderer once told me, “is wherever I happen to be at any given point in time.” His sense of roots, of permanence, is scant. Thin soil or rich loam, it’s all the same to him. The English root of the word home is ham, meaning village, this in turn derived from the old Norse heimr, which can also mean “world.” For some, trees as well as people, the village they are born to is all the world they will see. For some who wander, everywhere is home.
There is a sequoia planted in a park about five miles from here, planted about a century ago by someone returning from California. It must be something of a mystery to its neighbors and they must wonder at its being so far from home. We say home and refer, albeit obliquely, back to heimr. The Norse word hopped over to English, but heimr itself goes back, like many species of trees back to Central Asia and just wandered for several thousand years.
Just the way some conifers moved east, so did people carrying the word home, along with its old root heimr, move westward. The two eventually meet again in the Pacific Northwest, a place I have not yet been since I tend to stay here, in this valley where I was born and whose worn grey green hills define my world. The ancestors of the trees and our ancestors have wandered far, yet we breath the same air as we did then and we are perpetually meeting up with them- old bones and old bark- tumbling through a long cycle on this dusty planet. At no point can we say we have left home. The pine siskins feed on the seeds we leave out for them and make themselves at home. They abide in ease, preening in the sun, eating what they find, bringing enjoyment to us as we watch them. We say they are migrating but this is nonsense. Their roots reach only as deep as they need to. Each day they alight in a different place, but the same home. Each day another reunion, sweet in its rarity and brevity.
David Allan Brooks lives near Muncy Creek in Pennsylvania, where he makes erratic attempts at living a contemplative life. He has been writing prose poems off and on since he was a young and surly person, and he’s currently fine-tuning a collection called Inspector of Clouds. Recent work of his is appearing in The Phare and he has an