My Feathered Teachers

The smell of bacon and grits filled the three bedroom wooden house that seemed to buckle at its seams. Myself, Betsy, Jenny, Matthew, Beth, Mark and Dottie all split up between two rooms. Mama and a man who we only knew by the name of Joe and came around a few nights each week had the third bedroom, which was always, from as long fas I can remember, off limits to us kids. Smelling bacon usually meant there was a celebration of some kind. With seven of us it was hard to keep track of birthdays and such, and well, if you omitted to tell someone your big day was coming up, it likely wasn’t getting celebrated. So knowing none of my brothers or sisters had a birthday today, on March 18,1975, I struggled to wake fully, thinking surely the smell of bacon still lingered from a dream. But no, it was bacon.

“Gemma, you know what the hell going on?” Matthew wailed from the bunk under me.

I had no clue and remember starkly the feeling of relief that rushed over me knowing I was not alone in complete confusion.

“Get in here fore’ it’s all gone,” yelled a smoke laden voice from the kitchen.

Matthew and I stared at each other for a moment until we both darted, along with Beth, straight through the door and into the creaky hallway. Dottie shoved her way through us easily as she was the smallest of us all, confused by all the uproar.

Picking Dottie up in the air and whirling her about so fast that for a moment I thought she might fall in the bacon grease, Mama yelled, “Babies we just done won the lottery!”

Betsy seemed to be the only one not so excited. She simply sighed deeply and walked out into the backyard, flinging the wooden framed screen door behind her. I could have sworn I heard her call out like an owl, “Hoo hoo,” as her voice trailed away into the spring mist.

Of course Mama hadn’t won the actual lottery that day, you know, the big one. Mama did win five-thousand though on the Pick 3, and well, there was a lot of bacon to go around until that Georgia heat crept in then slowly slinked away again come October. It was around then there was no more smell of bacon in the air or any seed of hope for that matter.

The days following into winter were cold, not just because of the abnormally frigid weather this winter brought, but because the yelling grew louder, the glasses breaking piled up, and one by one they left.

First went Betsy, who always looked out for me. In fact, she looked out for everyone and everything. Betsy left quickly that one morning. It must have been only a day at most before Thanksgiving because Mama was raising hell at Joe and anyone who crossed her path that we had no money for a turkey, nonetheless grits to eat. Betsy was the strongest of us, though I was the eldest. I looked up to her strangely enough. But that’s not what took me by surprise the day she left. It was the fact that I always thought I would be the first to go.

Betsy had secretly applied to a big state college, over 500 miles away, and well, she got right in. Before Mama or I could talk her or guilt her out of her big dreams she did the smartest thing she could and packed up and got on the next bus towards Raleigh.

She hugged me goodbye, trying to psh back the tears and handed me a piece of twine bound notebook paper. It took me two full days to open and read it.

I waited for the right moment, when I could prepare myself for reading what she must have tirelessly spent time writing to me, as a parting note. When I finally garnered up the courage and sentiment to read it I walked out to the dilapidated barn that sat just on the edge of the woods outback our house and opened the note to read,

“Please feed the owls in the barn every other day or so.” “That, that was it?” I thought, astounded.

“What owls? Is this a riddle?” I questioned to myself, out loud.

It was then I remembered that strange day when we were all excited over the lottery winnings, clamour and uproar about the house, when Betsy calmly sulked off, calling for the owls as it turned out.

As confusing as it seemed, the next day I rode my hatchback to the Feed & Grow and found some food suitable for barn owls. I probably should have looked in that old decrepit barn first, as there was a wooden box with a piece of notebook paper, just like the one Betsy left, that said, “Owl Food.”

It took me twenty-eight years to finally getting around looking into what owls actually eat. Turns out, it wasn’t the bird feed type seed mix we had been feeding them. In fact, they likely went out hunting for themselves after the moon rose, catching vermin and what have it. They didn’t need the food we supplied, it took me too long to realize. To them, it was simply a show of hospitality.

But as Betsey instructed, I went out every other day, religiously, to feed the damn barn owls. For the first two days the feed sat untouched, though I could hear them rustling about on the rafters of the barn. I shrugged it off until the third day when I saw the one peeping an eye open as I curiously fingered the seed and looked around the barn. The lighter colored looking owl, with grey streaks running down his spine and wings, greeted me, “ca hoo.” Cautiously I remember cooing back, “hoo,” before I could even notice it was already echoing through the air. Another similar call as reverberated back, “ca hoo.” This time, the sound from across from where the silvery and black owl perched. A calm and peacefulness was exchanged between the two before a breath of silence. Complete and utter silence. The first owl cooed in a muted volume lightly at me and before thinking, I called back “I’m ok. I brought you some food.” What I can only describe as the way owls must laugh is the sound I was met with at that.

I went back two days later, and a day after that until days become months and Christmas passed with no pleasantry. No pleasantry except for the owls which I so looked forward to seeing which now had become almost daily. I brought their seed in effort to convince myself I was needed, that I had no choice but to escape what had become almost nightly bouts of shouting, shattering glass, and slamming doors. My therapy session each morning with my feathered teachers gave me the peace to get past that, and I looked forward to it as I fell asleep each night.

It was nearly three years later that I got out of there. I went from a little old town off the interstate in Georgia to work as a social worker in Atlanta, the big city. On the hardest of days, when a case seemed just too much to take on, I remembered the peacefulness and tranquility those owls brought me and I decided things weren’t so bad after all. That is, once I talked about it with those teachers of mine.

I worked onwards to become a counselor within the social welfare system. I try to pass on the peace that those owls taught me, even in the roughest of times. My owls, my friends, my feathered teachers were simply there to tell me that it would be okay.

Those two barn owls, who I came to know and adore over three of the years I spent at that busting at the seams old house on the edge of the woods, saved me, just as my little sister Betsy knew they would do.