The Story of a Backyard

Buried in my backyard are an adolescent fox, a house cat, two squirrels, and several birds. We’d watched a family of foxes with gleeful interest for months when one of the pups was hit by a car in front of our house. I agreed with my devastated wife that we couldn’t just leave him out there. The same was true of the cat. She wasn’t ours, but she was clearly someone’s, and she deserved a proper funeral. The squirrels, too, were roadkill. A lot of animals die on the road in front of our house. It’s a residential street, but it connects two other busy and important roads. People cut through and routinely drive twice the speed limit. So, there’s lots of dead animals to bury in my backyard. I would want to be buried back there too, but the days for that are over.

It’s almost an acre of mostly unbothered land which is true for my neighbors as well. So, there’s lots of living animals too. We still see the foxes, a family of three now. I’ve seen a coyote, a diamondback so big it looked mythological, a family of rabbits we’ll revisit a bit later, standard chipmunks, and standard squirrels. For one brief glittering moment, I even saw a mink. In its shining and beautiful fur, it chased two chipmunks out of the ivy and then spun around and disappeared back into it. I didn’t know it was a mink. I thought it was a weasel until I stepped into the forest of computer tabs. I didn’t even know they lived here.

I was never an expert on birds, but there’s lots of them too. There’s the whole jewel-encrusted sky of birds you’ve seen but don’t know the name of. There’s the handful you do know, too: cardinals, blue jays who disappeared for years because of a viral pandemic but who then reappeared, bluebirds, titmice, the whole gang. We have several generations now of hawks. I have heard—but I have never seen—a barn owl.

The first time he called to me, it was the middle of the night, and I was asleep. He woke me up with his hooting. In the far depths of the backyard where the properties meet each other, is a forest, so to speak, of giant skinny pine trees towering over shrubs and then a blanket of English ivy. Down, far away, and up in the trees, I heard him:

“Wh-who who whooo!”

I woke but didn’t stir. I lay on my side, listening to him hoot and stared at the wall. My wife breathed rhythmically, in harmony with his hooting. She was and is a heavy sleeper, and there aren’t many internal or external stimuli that can keep her up.

He repeated himself.

“Wh-who who whooo!”

He reasserted himself.

“Wh-who who whooo!”

On and on he went for some time. I listened. I loved the sound the first few times but started to wonder if he would go on all night and keep me awake. I don’t know what happened first. Either he stopped, or I fell asleep.

When I woke up, I was alone. The room and the yard were quiet. My wife and daughter were puttering away in the kitchen. Their breakfast ritual was nearing its missa est, and I felt bad that I’d slept in, leaving the morning routine to my wife yet again.

I told myself to get up quickly, to say some morning prayers, and stay off my phone. As usual, I treated myself to a little peek and that peek gorged itself into ten minutes or more of social media. I glazed over into posh meals from posh local restaurants, ironic memes, earnest Catholic image macros, videos from comedians, pretty girls, and pretty outdoor vistas. When the weight of the time I wasted got too heavy, I finally got up.

I got up, stretched, and looked out my bedroom window. The yard was mostly withered and barren from the cold. The natural world, I thought, was prettier on my phone. I could also see my reflection in the glass.

I stepped into the kitchen. My wife sat on the floor, and my daughter sat at her small table. I poured myself a cup of coffee without saying anything. The first cup of coffee is close to the best part of my day and takes a certain priority. After a certain amount of time and intimacy, a lot of greetings can become perfunctory.

“Did you hear the owl last night?” I asked the room.

“What owl?!” my daughter screamed pleasantly.

“Oh, no, I didn’t,” my wife soothingly intoned.

“Where was the owl?!” my daughter demanded.

“I heard him way down in the backyard.”

She looked at me for a moment then wordlessly returned to her cereal. I went to pee. Due to some weird superstition too ancient and harmless to examine much less break, I stand next to the toilet when I pee instead of in front of it. It does offer a good look through the bathroom window into the backyard though.

I’m not certain why or when it started, but since we moved here I’ve read the goings on in the backyard through some kind of spiritual lens. When I’d have some trouble in my soul, I would often see the foxes. A flight of birds taking off or landing would echo the spirit in my breast. Most clearly was a sign of the birth of my daughter.

My wife and I share a pet name and call each other “Bunny.” One day, four or so years ago, my Bunny jubilantly called me to the same bathroom to look out the same window. A pair of rabbits were cautiously making their way from one end of the yard to the other. They’d paused to rest or reconnoiter.

“It’s us!” my wife said.

“Yeah,” I smiled. The thought came unbidden into my head that if this rabbit couple, our little totems, had a baby rabbit, then so would we. No sooner had the thought entered my mind than the tiniest baby rabbit hopped over and rested by his mama. They’d stopped to let him catch up. My wife exploded with delight, and I stayed silent. My daughter was conceived in the winter of that year.

None of the other signs or omens I’d read in the yard have been as clear as that one. At times I felt—I still feel—that the communications were clear as a bell and at other times that I am forcing meaning onto the random and indifferent comings and goings of nature. So, naturally, the owl preoccupied me. What did it mean? Did it mean anything? Would I hear him again? And what was I to make of it if I did?

I left the house later that morning on one errand or another. Driving, I looked into the backyards of the other houses. The properties slope down from the road but rise up again by the time you get to the back, so you can see right into them. Everyone’s yard was at least as big and wild as ours. How long that can last is anyone’s guess. The city is expanding. It grows out in concentric circles like a metal tree. Small towns are becoming exurbs. Exurbs, suburbs. And suburbs, suburbs swallowed up. Places around us were changing, becoming newer, cleaner, and more tamed. Just across the street from us, one little brick ranch house on one plot of land had been turned into five houses on five little lots. The house that looked like ours had been transmuted into five mostly identical cubes that looked like storage containers.

Saddest of all, on the way to the store or wherever I was going, was that little blue house. By then, the characteristic violence of the time and place had already happened. The little blue house with the maroon shutters, the installed wheelchair ramp, the functioning well, the hundred-year oaks, and the acres of green land—all of that was gone. A sign was posted excitedly declaring the name of the new development and the cost per unit. It was a kind of pastel purple and had all sorts of exclamation points and particularly important information inside a star in the corner. It sat in front of acres of churned-up, lifeless red clay. It would all turn into rivers of mud at the first rain. As far as the eye could see, piles of red clay sat motionless, birdless, minkless. All around the perimeter were tangles of felled trees.

The value of our property had doubled since we moved in. I knew I could sell it in a heartbeat. I could easily find someone to buy my house, tear it down, cut down all my trees, gouge up my land into red clay, and grind up the bones of the fox and the cat that I had buried back there. Where would the foxes go? And the rabbits? And the owl? Had he lived behind that little blue house?

I heard him again that night.

“Wh-who who whooo!”

It woke me up. I sat up in bed and heard my wife’s undisturbed, rhythmic breathing.

“Wh-who who whooo!”

Who indeed? As he went on and on, I grew agitated. I couldn’t escape the baby bunny and the foxes and what I felt they meant to me, what I felt they told me. What, I wondered, was I being told now? What, in this still house with wife, child, and cats all asleep and only me awake, was I being told?

“Wh-who who whooo!”

Maybe, as everyone hoped for themselves, the time, my time had come. Nature and Nature’s God were going to tell me—what I didn’t know—but something in the backyard.

“Wh-who who whooo!”

Maybe I was being offered some vision, some duty, journey, quest, or an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary with some message for the world. I don’t fully know why, but lying in bed, I decided I needed to go out. I decided that there was something waiting for me back there.

I climbed out of bed, trying my best not to disturb my wife. The hardwood floor creaked under my feet, and the doors I went through squealed and squeaked.

“Wh-who who whooo!”

It’s amazing the amount of noise you and the world make when you’re trying to be quiet. A person can navigate pretty well in familiar darkness, so I made my way through the house. I knocked something over in the dining room, and I stubbed my toe in the kitchen. Stepping down into the addition, I missed one of the steps and stumbled pretty badly. Finally, I made it to the sunroom. The big glass doors faced into the backyard into the night.

“Wh-who who whooo!”

I realized I wasn’t wearing shoes. Maybe that’s part of it, I figured. I unlocked the door and opened it. The house is old and settled. Opening a lot of the doors can cause a loud crack. I winced at the sound. The cold air swept in and around me.

I stepped onto the deck and immediately regretted that I hadn’t worn shoes. The cold wood with its knots and splinters made every inch of my feet tingle and ache. Having started and gone this far, I thought, I should soldier on to whatever destiny I thought awaited me. Anyway, it wouldn’t hurt so much when I was on the grass.

Down the stairs and onto the grass, I was immediately disabused of this notion. The bare ground just hurt in a new and different way. Rocks, acorns, and sticks stabbed into my feet. I kept the yard pretty natural on purpose, so I wasn’t so much walking on grass as different weeds, some sharper and thicker than others. Again, I’d come this far. I hobbled my way to the middle of the yard, down the slope, and next to the kiwi bush that the previous owner had planted there.

I found what felt like a good spot, and I settled in. I waited. It had been a few minutes since he’d last hooted, so it was time. It was time for whatever was going to happen to happen. Only once while I was standing there, in my bare feet and pajamas, did a thought occur to me. I didn’t have any real expectations for what this would be. I hadn’t had some thunderbolt or revelation. Nothing had come into my mind the way it did with the rabbits. Everything that had happened in the past had been interior to myself. They’d been some movement or reaction of my mind or my spirit. Would something internal or external happen? Would I understand some new thing in some new way? Or would I see something truly? Would something appear before me? The owl? Or something else? Whatever it was, I knew I was ready. So, I waited. I stood in the silence of the night, with my bare feet on the cold ground. The world around me was still. I shifted my feet and stepped on an acorn.

“Eow!” I scream-whispered. My scrunched-up face relaxed as the pain receded. My heart was beating, either from the pain or from anticipation, but I managed to settle down and resume my waiting. My eyes had adjusted to the dark. I felt small, surrounded by the tall pines, the kiwi bush, and my tool shed all warped and elongated by the dark. It was a little creepy. I heard a dog bark way off in the distance. I wondered if I'd made enough noise that he was barking at me.

It was past time for a hoot, but thus far, nothing. I waited. The real cold had started to set in. I started to shake, but I continued to wait. I waited in the quiet and shook. Nothing had happened yet. I looked up as I continued my vigil for another hoot, some sign from the owl. I saw Orion’s Belt or part of one of the dippers. I wasn’t sure. There was a smattering of other little stars but not much. The light pollution from the nearby metropolis outshined everything else. I kept waiting. I heard one or two cars pass on the road in front of the house. Every now and then the dog would bark again. For the first time I thought to give it a set amount of time and then call it if nothing happened. I was still looking up at the little stars along the tree line.

I looked down. It was quiet. For the first time, I thought I was being silly. I expected in that moment of doubt for something to happen. But it didn’t. I resolved to wait five more minutes and go back inside. After some time, I realized I had no way of gauging when it had been five minutes. I had always been bad at judging time, among other things, and I realized it must have been five minutes by then. The backyard was silent. The owl hadn’t said anything. The owl hadn’t meant anything. I turned around and started walking. Once again I stumbled over the acorns, rocks, and twigs, tiptoeing violently in the way you do when you’re stepping on things that hurt. Some part of me was sure the owl would cry out before I got inside.

I made it to the deck. I made it to the door. I put my hand on the knob and waited. I heard crickets and a car pass in front of the house and nothing else. I loudly cracked the door open again and stepped inside. The warmth of the house swirled around me. I walked slowly back to my bedroom through my sleeping house. A cat meowed at me as I passed. I couldn’t tell which one. I was disappointed in the world and embarrassed with myself, in what order I don’t know. What did I expect anyway? There’re no uncharted places left to adventure through. There’re no more dragons left to slay.

“Wh-who who whooo!”

I was halfway back to my room and had been in the house for a minute or so. It was clear I’d scared him by being outside, and now that I was gone, the bird felt free to be himself again. Maybe he wasn’t even the species of owl that gave out mythical quests. Maybe they’d gone extinct from a fungus or a virus or from habitat loss.

I got back into bed. My wife slept through my going and coming, my coming and going. My daughter was silent. She’s always been a good sleeper. I heard the owl one or two more times, and then I fell asleep. I didn’t have any dreams that night that I could remember.

I woke up the next morning, alone in my room. I got on my phone first thing and scrolled through the other world that lived in my phone. Finally, I got up and looked out our bedroom window. The backyard, and that whole world, looked pretty much the same as ever. I walked to the kitchen to see the normal routine was playing itself out. We said our good mornings, and I got my coffee. I didn’t say anything to anyone about my canceled date with destiny, and no one would have known to ask.

I left the house again that day and passed the same orange waste, now crowded with construction equipment and workers milling around. On my way wherever I was going, two or three streets away, I passed another broad set of woods. I passed it all the time. It was two or three houses on what must have been ten to fifteen acres of land. I saw for the first time. It too had a sign announcing a new development. All the trees I could see had pink ribbons tied around them. As it faded into my rear-view mirror I could hope the ribbons meant “Leave these trees alone. Don’t cut them down.” But I knew it almost certainly meant the exact opposite.

Days passed. We saw the foxes here and there. Birds came and went, including giant flocks of red-winged black birds. Squirrels got bold in the winter and hung out on our window ledges for the warmth, infuriating the cats. But after that night, I didn’t hear the owl again.

Days went on, the strange memory of that night started to fade, and I believed less and less that I was capable of such a thing. One morning, I was in my daughter’s room. She putzed around on the floor, my wife sat in her toddler bed, and I stared out her window into the backyard. I warmed my hands with a cup of coffee and dreaded the full day of work from home I had in front of me. The sun was poking over the trees.

“Tell Daddy where we’re going today,” my wife instructed.

My daughter said they were going to a state park, about a ten-minute drive from the house. We’d rarely gone in the past but had started going a lot. Trails, attractions, a museum, and some other features were centered around a huge quartz monzonite bubble of a mountain. You can see it from miles around. It towers over the landscape. You can see the metro downtown skyscrapers from the summit, but most of the city is invisible under the trees. I’d gone with them a week or so before, and we’d taken a cable car to the summit. It was a cold day anyway, but it was freezing in the elevation and the wind. Nonetheless, we had a ball. The cable car first deposits you into a little educational pavilion with geological displays and descriptions of the animal and plant life. After walking around and warming our bones we’d headed outside. I noticed as we left the building the paved area simply ended raggedly into the bare granite. There was no sharp edge or subtle transition, like the mountain had broken through the sidewalk. We walked around the summit buffeted by the wind. Our little faces turned pink, and our hands ached. It looked like another world up there. Its bare smooth rock. Seeing the skyscrapers in the distance I could recognize that it was this world after all. Here and there on the smooth white stone, little trees and shrubs poked out and shook in the wind like the rest of us. Also, in little patches sprinkled all around were small beds of moss and lichen. Eventually we fled the summit and the wind back into the little structure clinging to the peak. I held the door for my wife as she carried my daughter, and I looked at the ground. The entrance was tiled with little unglazed ceramic squares. I saw that in between the tiles, surrounding each and every one, was moss, green and growing, obscuring the edges.

That was a week or so prior though. They weren’t going to the summit that day. They were going to a little bird-watching trail that runs around the base of the mountain. They’d gone a few days before too.

“You really like it there, huh?” I asked my daughter.

“Nyeah! Uuum…we’re going on the King’s Trail!”

“Oh, fun. You went there before right?”

“Nnnnyeah! We saaaaaw a bluebird aaaaaand a robin aaaaaand a cardinal!”

“Oh wow.”

“Nnnnyeah, and you know what we heard?”

“What?”

“We even heard a owl!”

I was silent for a second.

“You heard an owl?” I looked at my wife serenely nodding with her eyes closed. “Wow, that’s really neat,” I said.

“Yeah! If I hear the owl again or see any more birds, I’ll tell you,” my girl announced resolutely.

“Yeah, please do,” I said.

“Nyeah,” she replied flatly. Then she began to do a pencil roll on the carpet. She’d learned it in dance class. That had been her adventure. She was scared of other children and scared to be away from us for too long. But she was brave, and she did it. And look at her now.