Familiar and Foreign Caul

I first met the barn owl in the depths of one of the dark and bottomless nights that followed the burial of my husband, my only family, who in death had yet to visit, though I often wandered our small property, endlessly seeking his spirit. I hoped at least to be transmuted to a form that could survive his unsurvivable passing, and in this alchemy to find access to his ghost.

Instead, I found the owl.

The trailer was supposed to have been temporary. It was a sad, banged up, single-wide affair already present on the land when we bought it. My husband, filled with the pioneering spirit sweeping across the creative community, was sure we’d build our homestead here, complete with tiny home, built with our own hands. We got as far as framing it up before …

So I lived in the temporary-now-not trailer. It had only been two months since he had died but I began dreaming nightly that weeds were cracking up through the foundation we had poured, raising into gnarled vines, choking the life out of everything they touched, reaching until they found every last good thing.

Waking into a sleep-drunk fog, I stepped barefoot from the trailer into the wet midnight grass. It was raining. The wet blades slipped sharp between my toes and around my ankles like a nosy neighbor asking questions at the doctor’s office.

What are you here for?

What’s wrong with you?

How’s your husband?

What does this pain offer up to me in payment?

I used to worry about snakes. What did I care about snakes now? The worst thing that could happen to me had already happened. I wandered out into the miniature grassland of the property, looking, as I always did, for signs of the mysterious weeds that were tearing down everything and signs that my husband was talking to me from the great beyond. As always, I could find neither. The foundation to our home was still poured, still waiting for a life it would never have.

I was still waiting for a sign that I couldn’t yet believe was never coming.

The rain came stronger now, breaking me from my search. I ran for cover beneath the wild and gnarled tree that would have stood behind our home. I imagined us laying under its boughs, reading books to each other, playing music, staring through branches at the clouds … no.

I cowered under the branches, now bare and barely any protection from the cold slap of rain, feeling foolish, when from above me, behind me, from everywhere unleashed an earthly scream.

I fell to the ground cracking my knee against a sharp rock and crying out in my own scream of pain. Frantically, I cast my gaze around to find the source. And there, in the tree, there he was.

The barn owl. In the near-complete darkness of the rainy night, his face shone a ghostly pale heart, and here we were, halfway through February, my ethereal valentine.

For reasons I can’t explain, my heart rate instantly slowed and a calmness spread over me. I wasn’t just glad to see the owl, I was relieved.

“Nice night for a walk, huh?” I joked up to owl. The owl looked away from me, almost pointedly. “Okay, fair enough.”

I realized I was trembling. I looked down and saw that the knee of my pajama pant leg was tinged dark with blood, and that my pajamas stuck tight to my body in the rain. It was warm for February – thanks climate change – but it was still winter. I was underdressed, barefoot, and now injured.

I looked back up at the bird, who was once again looking down at me, his eyes a flash of blackness in the inky dark of the storm. I felt unsettled and lost in those eyes that somehow felt familiar.

“I have to go,” I said, “But I’ll see you again soon?”

Back at the trailer, I dressed my wound—minor—and fell into a deep sleep, the best one I’d had since the funeral. I slept so long that when I woke, the sun was already dipping back below the tree line. I’d missed the entire day, though I hadn’t planned to do much with it. Night was the time for stalking my ghosts.

When I stepped into the yard, my eye immediately caught the movement on the trailer’s roofline. In a series of flutters and clacks, the owl made his presence known to me.

“H-Hello again,” I said, “Better weather.”

With an ear-piercing scream, the owl took off, but only traveled a few feet, landing on the ground ahead of me, then looked back with those deep, familiar eyes. To make the message clear to me, he hopped forward one step more along the path.

Follow.

I followed the owl. He, occasionally flying. Me, occasionally slipping on the still-wet grass and weeds of our land. We didn’t go far, just off our property line to the neighbor’s old, dilapidated barn. I balked at entering someone else’s property. The bird beckoned with his bottomless gaze. I followed.

Inside, the owl flew up, high into moldering hay bales, then quickly back down, across to the far wall of the barn, to the floor, to … oh no.

I approached and saw what the owl wanted me to see.

“Is … was this your family?” I whispered, my hand going of its own accord to touch his heart-shaped face.

The owl fell to his back, flapping his wings and clacking his beak, wild animal again.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I cried out, stepping back from the frantic bird, away from the scene, trying to stay present and hold space for the avian tragedy, this familiar and foreign grief, without causing more harm.

I sat on the dusty floor of the barn, weeping as the owl slowly calmed himself. In the distance, I could hear the howling of coyotes. Would they be interested in this tableau? Had they created it in the first place?

I looked around the forgotten barn and found a rusted shovel. The earth behind the barn was soft from the rain, easy for digging, though it squelched up with water between mounds of soil. When the hole was deep enough, I took off my robe and went back to the birds.

“I’m going to wrap them up, okay?” I told the owl. I tried to walk the line between asking him permission and telling him what I was doing. I tried to be respectful. It’s so hard to lose your family. It was only then that I noticed the wound on his leg. Had he gotten it during that evening? The night before?

The owl allowed me to gently place the tender reminders of his past life into my soft, warm robe, then into the earth. It was only when I was covering the hole with soil that he flew from the barn in a swift and screeching lunge that shook the air from my lungs. He dove in a tumble that sent me doubled over to protect my face, but he flew past me. When he emerged from the brush that nestled up against my side, a wriggling, striped snake was dying, clamped in his beak.

He saved me.

I panted, my heart pounding. I watched hungrily as the owl made a meal of it.

At home, I stared into the mirror, into my bottomless familiar gaze, my eyes dark and sated like a moonless February night. I picked idly at one of the painless splinters wedged into my palm. Gifts, I assumed, from the shovel. The downy, pale bits of fluff emerging from the skin refused to be pulled free.