the returning time

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Years ago, I gathered maps in every color I could find. I scrounged through bins in thrift shops and antique stores, and printed and kept bits of cartography from the Internet that interested me. 

One afternoon, I spread the maps across my bedroom floor, took scissors to them, and fashioned them into a bird—a barn swallow with a blue head, russet throat, and tawny belly. I built the swallow from maps and drew a branch for the bird, a place to perch. I glued the pieces carefully onto a blank sheet of printer paper, and with a pencil, I wrote their scientific name in careful cursive: Hirundo rustica. Two weeks later, I found a small frame on the sidewalk, and in went the bird. 

I had no particular connection to barn swallows, only that the boy I loved had gotten them tattooed to either side of his chest. A sailor tattoo, the first swallow is meant to commemorate the completion of 5,000 nautical miles, and the second is given upon reaching 10,000. I was with him in the tattoo parlor on the day he got them, and he said something to me about how they always come back—these tiny birds traveling far from home, always returning.

While the birds were pressed into his skin, I sat and flipped through books of other sailor tattoos—images for protection against drowning, reminders to hold tight to the rigging, to stay the course, a boat to celebrate a seaworthy clipper. A heart to keep a beloved close. I wanted a talisman of protection, too. And so I made the barn swallow. That was thirteen years ago. Now, the map bird hangs in an inconspicuous spot in my kitchen, just above the countertop where I spread jam on toast for my children. 

I've been thinking about swallows again, learning them. A group of swallows is called a kettle. They are passerine birds that make me think of sea glass and cinnamon. I sketch and paint the shapes of their bodies and their long, forked tails. Drawing them is like drawing iconography—a handled chalice, flaming water.

I've been reading about their behavior, too, and jotting questions down in my field notebook. Do they ever get lost? Are their migrations ever disturbed? I have a poor sense of direction, am prone to losing my way. I've been reading about barn swallows because I am trying to remember how to inhabit my own heart, how to return. 

I walk almost daily to a salt marsh near my home. Beside Pier 1 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, smooth cordgrass is planted to safeguard the park from the harbor's turbulence. I sit on the salvaged granite and watch the boats, Lady Liberty in the harbor, and the sailing ships docked across the water in Lower Manhattan. It is best in April and May—mornings thick with fog, the birds beginning to arrive.  

Earlier this spring, I was walking and thinking of someone I love. Without really meaning to, I found myself hanging a strand of my hair from the branch of a serviceberry tree. I don't know why I did this. It was the height of migration season, and I suppose I hoped that the strand would be of use, find its way into a nest and soften the bed of a hatchling. 

It was that morning that the swallows arrived. I saw them coming, their distinctive shapes swooping over the water like winged acrobats, returning to their mud nests under the piers. I knew about their migratory patterns. They are birds I love. My daughter carries a barn swallow puppet with her sometimes, letting it fly down the sidewalk while she skips. But I never anticipated seeing their arrival. I cried out, Look! to no one. 

I watched them orbiting one another, tilting and dropping over the water. The simple fact of them was like falling in love and falling hard, pausing and staring in wonder, a sudden vitality, a rush of blood, part soaring, part tumbling, an experience daring you to look away. There were so many, the dawn sky full of wings. 

Later that day I told someone, breathless, what I'd witnessed. You'll never believe what I saw. He looked at me blankly. Did I not know how common barn swallows are? They're everywhere. I started to say Yes, but—and stopped myself. But I could feel them inside me still—tilt, drop, sweep, orbit. Iridescent blue and russet, tail feathers reaching out. 

There is an essay I love called "Living Like Weasels" in Annie Dillard's 1982 book, Teaching a Stone to Talk. The essay is printed onto two neat pages and hangs above my desk. In it, she says, "I would like to learn, or remember, how to live." She describes an encounter with a weasel, how it behaves, inhabiting its wildness, devoting itself unyieldingly to what it deems necessary. "We could live like that, you know," Annie writes. I think of that essay when I have encounters that astonish me.

The barn swallows arrived, and I watched them swoop and feed in flight and thought of Annie: "We could live like that, you know." What would it mean to live like this? Something about returning. About play and grace and hunger. About grasses and feathers and mud. About trust. We could live like this, you know: Trusting in the season, trusting that we will arrive where we need to be.