“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
“You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.”
“It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”
He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”
—Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
She visited him in time of transition, in movement from one life place and chapter to another; when life and time give natural pause, permission, and possibility to redirect one’s story while it lives.
He too was in transition, as all active and living who face challenges, growth, and change must be; and when he stopped, he was alone.
He welcomed her with a smile, kindness in eyes and face beneath autumn visage of one who, living full in mind and spirit, forgets they have a face: disheveled but clean and aglow with a joy of mind in contemplation and discernment. A beard grew, brown and specked with gray that shone more pronounced more in every lived season.
She felt a warmth of familiarity from sight of his eyes and smiles even as its accents, as with hers, were changed in edges, lines, and aged accents through years and life lived. They sat on a porch holding small talk of lives known little by the other but were glad, in lived moment, to share as wavetops across vast ocean view: serene from a distance and far from the tides, currents, and undulations of life and sea encountered firsthand.
After, he showed her his home: the office and only room he troubled to give sign an character to his own style an spirit. There was a reading chair and side table, a piano that came with the house, a small desk for writing, and book shelves that ran the length of a wall that rose from above the desk to ceiling of the room.
The shelves were handmade; its books his. On its stained and finished planks, there were histories, biographies, fictions, theologies, and dreams that, like him, were open books if one wished to understand, open, and read. Book stops and accents were weighted accents of histories: gifts, fishing reels, mugs weighted with pens, cigar boxes, and in the center: a copper vase, edges greened in weather and age, held spread of gathered feathers. She stared at its place, its contents, an she thought of a story.
He read her face as her attention caught on the vase and the collection it contained. He watched her still as her focus widened and she caught sight of the sunset cover and silhouette tree on spine of the story she recalled.
He blushed in eyes, as the same in face stayed covered in beard and suntanned skin when she united the book and vase together.
“What all’s in there?” she asked.
“Just a few that I’ve found,” he answered. “I always liked that part of the story, and I remember the gift feathers most; the way they showed small attentions and gifted to one another what they perceived the other to cherish.”
“Where do you find them?” she asked.
“Everywhere,” he answered. “Walking pastures, in barns, in front of my feet stepping from of a tractor. I find them overt and waiting, laying in my path—as if in sign—when my head is down and thoughts are somewhere else.”
“What are they from?”
“Turkeys, eagles, hawks, owls, doves…a heron, bluebird…I don’t know what all. I find new ones every day. I put them in my pocket, collect them in tractors and trucks. Hold to them for a while until I forget—ruin them in the wash or they catch in a wind and blow to somewhere new when I leave a truck or tractor door. These are the few I saved.
She smiled staring on the feathers, remembering the story and how she once spoke in mention of it to him for its description of natural scenes.
Sometimes it was easier to talk of stories than of one’s self; to leave presumed fictions and layers of safety and separation between one’s self and another than to openly show one’s spirit.
Stories say with metaphor an allusion what one rarely shares of one’s self—especially introverts—leaving meaning and purpose to be found, interpreted, and understood by the audience to whom it’s given: should another trouble and seek and see.
The words we give and the stories we share: all of them hold purpose.
She looked at the shelves, the titles and way he ordered them into place: biographies highest and furthest away—read but rarely returned to when finished. Beneath were Harvard Classics, neatly ordered in colored and marked set; then histories—ancient Greek and Roman progressing into nearer times, the American Civil War being the most prominent of the histories.
In the center, a group of books was set apart: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Les Miserables, Huckleberry Finn, A River Runs Through It. Beneath these held the feather collection framed to the right by a bayonet in scabbard—gift from a former profession—and to the left a by paperweight of pens and quote of Benjamin Franklin: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
He lived the words.
She looked at his shelves again, the gathering of feathers center-symbol from an ideal and book she shared.
There is always something to the stories that we share, even when we fail to make sense of the reason—even to ourselves.
She observed, contemplating in silence.
“I like the ideal of it,” he said, breaking the quiet of the room “even if it’s fiction. I like the ideal of small gifts left in hope for another to find. I like the ideal of gifts and signs—recognized and meaningful to two—but unnoticed and unseen to the rest of a world that does not care or value such symbolism and sign. I like to believe in an innocence of gifts that can be of a good spirit and need be nothing more.”
“But they became more…” she answered, speaking once again.
“Yes, but without the innocence and letting life play as it did, there would not have been the beauty.”
There is always meaning to the words and stories that we share.
She thought still on the story, reflected on the wavetops of their time: two ocean spirits with depths the world would never know but each prayed another might, one day, discern.
She stayed in the shallows knowing their end to time was near. She wondered thoughts she would never speak, never share, hold alone for contemplation until time removed them all together.
“It’s been good to see you,” she said. “I should be going.”
He smiled kindly.
“Thank you for troubling to stop and say hello.”
He went to the shelves and drew a feather from the vase: a semi-plume—white cream with thin banded stripes of brown; an end of tight barbs that loosened into open afterfeather. It was the heart feather of a barned owl, a bird of wisdom, sight, and silence.
He offered it out to her with extended hand. “For your trouble.”
She smiled, appreciating the ideal and gift for what it was; even if only a fiction. She drove west into golden sun that stared her in the eyes as it set over open plains. Its gold rays caught in her hair reflecting as strands of metallic light she could see in edge of rearview mirror.
The feather rested on the console, its loose afterfeather barbs catching in the soft currents of the cab. She thought on the story, on feathers and simple gifts as she stared eye to eye with light of the world.
Through waves of prairie grasses moving with the wind, she explored the depths of her own sea in silence as feather moved—faint but alive—on currents in the cab.