On Staying Home, or Bird-Watching in the Pandemic
I love experiencing all that a place has to offer in the pages of books and in actually traveling to those places. But when I’m not traveling, I love staying at home. I ran across a quote I copied down when reading Manalive* by G.K. Chesterton last summer—the main character is defending The Swiss Family Robinson,* and I found it really resonant to the time of confinement I experienced in France in the spring of 2020. The pandemic and different lockdown measures varied greatly for people around the world. For me, the lockdown measures were fairly strict, and I could not have been more delightfully situated for riding out fifty days within the confines of my garden walls. Summer is traditionally a time for holidays and traveling, but if you’re staying in one place, I hope you’ll be surprised by what you find within the confines of your own home and in your own backyard.
“When you’re really shipwrecked, you do really find what you want. When you’re really on a desert island, you never find it a desert. If we were really besieged in this garden, we’d find a hundred English birds and English berries that we never knew were here. If we were snowed up in this room, we’d be the better for reading scores of books in that bookcase that we don’t even know are there; we’d have talks with each other, good, terrible talks, that we shall go to the grave without guessing; we’d find materials for everything—christening, marriage, or funeral; yes, even for a coronation—if we didn’t decide to be a republic.””
If you had told me prior to 2020 that I would be required to stay at home for fifty straight days, I would have thought that would be impossibly difficult. But to my surprise, when I was really shipwrecked, I found everything I needed—birds to watch, blossoms unfurling, cherries ripening, snails crawling, books to read-aloud, conversations with my fellow castaways, bread to bake. We never made it around to crowning a king or queen, but I’m sure we could have.
Speaking of birds, I wrote last year about the robin that entertained us all spring, but I hung out my bathroom window with my camera in fascination on the day word got out that the cherries were ripe, and the all-you-can-eat bird buffet was now open. The birds came in droves, arriving by their various species, taking bites out of cherries and carrying them away from the fray to eat in peace. They put on quite the show.
I have bird-watching on the brain this week because it’s that time of year where they are building nests and visiting the feeder. I also visited the Audubon Museum and Nature Center last week in Kentucky, which I highly recommend if you’re in the area. Audubon’s paintings are gorgeous.
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