The Trash Heap and the Nest

Weary, I wheel a barrowful of weeds toward the trash heap.

“I’m discouraged,” I tell Marlo as I trudge past the six-foot fence that keeps deer from his vegetables.

“Why?” he asks, without looking up from patting in lettuce and carrot seeds.

“I’ve spent all morning on just one corner."

I apparently skipped that back corner during my April weeks of rake-and-burn.

So this morning I gathered up both old and new.

I lopped brown stalks of ornamental grass and hibiscus, cracked off black mum twigs, and raked limp leaves.

Then I dug dandelions as big as bowling balls.

While clicking to a new section of the Moby Dick recording was listening to, I saw that, instead of five more chapters left, I had thirty-five. Ishmael would not be done talking in time my Saturday plant sale after all.

Then, in the middle of Chapter 107, the recording lost its cyberspace signal and went dead.

A bird scolds overhead as I dump this fifth barrowful upon the heap. I sigh and decide to quit.

I wheel away from the heap. She swoops, raises her volume, and scolds again.

I look skyward, and spot her nest.

Not any ordinary nest.

An oriole nest.

Orioles don’t pile their gatherings of twigs and grass and straw helter-skelter above the joining of two twigs. They weave a nest that hangs below, then perch upon the twigs to feed their young.

I’ve been luring orioles to my deck with halves of oranges and leftover jam for several years now, but never seen their nest.

I last saw an oriole nest when I was ten. I sat in silence under the backyard clothes line and watched as they transported nesting stuff and wove. I was still and knew. . .

At ten, I had no words for the spacious stillness that nest opened in me.

I have no words now.

I have tried borrowing words from others—the ineffable, the numinous, sehnsucht. . .

But naming it remains always just beyond my grasp.

I look from the nest to the trash heap—the same stuff, both of them.

I know not the why or how, but I wheel the barrow beneath the deck, trailing clouds of glory.

I have seen the nest of an oriole.

And that has made all the difference.