There is a nest outside my office window.
I have spent more time in that office this summer than in any year before it, because this is the summer I have been writing PeaceTree. And somewhere in these same weeks, while I sat at my desk trying to give shape to a thing about tending your family, a bird was building a nest of her own a few feet away, on the beam under the eave, out of hundreds of tiny mouthfuls of mud.
I did not pay her much attention at first. If I am honest, I was a little disappointed in her. I thought at first she might be a bluejay, because of the blue that flashes off her back when she flies. I had no idea how many varieties of blue birds exist. She turned out to be a barn swallow. Barn swallow. How boring, I thought. Who wants a barn swallow when they could have had something more spectacular, like a Mountain Bluebird?!
I was wrong about her, and about nearly everything I assumed. But I didn’t learn it all at once. I learned it the only way you ever really learn anything about a small, living thing: by watching it, day after day, until watching quietly turned into caring, and I couldn’t tell you the moment it happened.
Now I check on her without meaning to. I look up from a hard paragraph on my computer and my eyes are already at the window before I decide to send them there. I can tell the two parents apart now, the one who sits low and tight in the cup and the slightly larger one who stands taller, and I’ve worked out that she sits lower on the eggs than he does, which is why some days I see only the top of a head and other days a whole back and tail. And the more I watch, the more I want to know. A question rises up in me and I go looking for its answer. How long until they hatch. Whether they mate for life. How far they fly when they finally leave. I’ve never called myself a bird watcher, and yet, here I am, looking up the private life of a barn swallow between paragraphs of PeaceTree.
Some days I worry. There was an afternoon the father would not leave the nest and kept driving the mother off, hour after hour, and she flew her wide circles out over the yard and never came back to take her turn. I didn’t know what it meant. I still don’t, entirely. But I know I stood at the glass caring very much how it turned out, which was not something I planned on when a bird I called boring moved in under my eave.
Mostly, though, it is waiting. The building has stopped. She sits. Nothing appears to happen for days, and it turns out a watched nest is a great deal like a watched pot. I keep a running guess in my head of when the eggs might have come and when they might hatch, and I am almost always wrong, and I keep counting anyway.
And here is the strange part: the same thing was happening on my side of the glass.
To anyone passing by, there was nothing to see. A bird sitting still. A woman at a desk. But underneath her, hidden, the eggs were doing the fastest work of their lives, a whole living bird assembling itself in a matter of days. And on my side, just as hidden, PeaceTree was coming together at what I can only call an alarming rate. What started as one idea, a family unity system, became a website, then workbooks, then books well on their way, faster than I could quite account for. No one else had seen any of it yet. It was all still up under the eave, so to speak.
PeaceTree grew the way an egg grows: quietly, in the dark, becoming itself faster than seemed possible, and arriving in its own time and not a moment before. The waiting and the racing turned out to be the same thing.
The hatch, when it comes, does not announce itself.
I keep waiting for noise, some unmistakable chorus that will tell me it has happened. Instead the change is so quiet I nearly miss it: the parents stop settling down for long stretches and start coming and going, quick trips in and out, leaning into the cup and lifting away. For a day or two I tell myself I am imagining it.
And then, one ordinary morning, there they are. A parent drops to the nest with food and two tiny heads lift over the rim of mud to meet it, one on each side, with surely more tucked down between. They’re here! After all the counting and the guessing, after the long watched-pot stretch of days that felt like it would never break, the thing I had half stopped believing would come has simply, suddenly come. They are here.
They are so quiet. Just a small squawk when a parent lands with something to eat, and then the hush closes over them again. I have been told this will not last, that soon it will be an open-mouthed clamor every time a shadow crosses the nest, and I believe it. But right now they are new, and impossibly small, and mostly silent, and I cannot make myself look away.
I sat down this morning meaning to work, certain I would not get a thing done because I’m obsessed with these baby birds. And it is true: the work I came to this desk to do is still undone. But I have written today after all. Maybe not about human families, but about this lovely new bird family instead.
Here is the part I did not plan, and could not have.
The morning those first heads rose over the rim of the nest was the same morning PeaceTree was finally ready to show anyone: the website, the Living Tree Guide, the beginnings of it all standing up on its feet at last. Two nests, a pane of glass apart, both finishing quietly in the dark, and then, on the same day, ready to be seen. Hers holding four small, hungry lives. Mine holding a way of seeing a family that I have spent the last three years trying to put into words.
I set out to write about paying attention. About how a family, tended on purpose, becomes something you could never have guessed from the outside. And the whole time I was writing it, a barn swallow I nearly ignored was teaching me the very same thing out my window: that you cannot truly watch something small and alive, day after day, without coming to love it. She caught my attention when I was not looking for it, and she has not given it back.
