They’re Having a BBQ Next Door

They’re having a bbq next door.

It’s barely noon on a blustery Sunday, presumably after the service led by the pastor neighbor in the white tents next to the house. The family spent the waning light before sunset cutting the grass, brushing their horses, and cleaning the grill. I can see everything from this second story barn apartment. Elk, deer, hawks, antelope, church.

Cars started pulling onto the manicured lawn early this morning, and now drivers and passengers are standing in circles separated by gender and age, trying to avoid the charcoal plumes spiking through the stiff June wind. I’m catching faint whiffs of smoke now and then, same in origin, but different in experience.

Kind of like the variant answers we come up with when we’re trying to find a path through uncertainty, answers that crash against each other like bumper cars at the canceled state fair.

Church isn’t cancelled anymore, at least not at the neighbor’s house. And there aren’t any bumper cars over there, just Subarus and Sprinters parked on the lawn.

Kids playing hide and seek, a couple of tweens petting the horses, laughter from parents finding, in conversation, some sort of commonality.

They’re having a bbq next door.

And They Flew

The evening before I left for the mountains, I headed down to the makeshift house to say goodbye.

More for me than them, of course. But I’d been watching their eyes gain light and feathers develop from tiny fibrous stubs ever since their eggs appeared, one by one, under the since-departed horse trailer.

I wanted to take one last look, because I’d already be under an alpine sky by the time they flew the nest.

Hopefully. I’d just seen a hawk escaping overhead with a tiny bird in its clutches, culled from one of the eucalyptus trees bordering the ranch. With any luck, the six fledglings, still tucked away in the oil-barrel-roof-tile-paver-house I’d cobbled together, would find a better fate.

I peered into the small alcove, prepared to quietly murmur my farewell, but a sudden ruffling made me catch my breath. I’d had the same surprised reaction when 6 bare baby bird heads had unexpectedly popped up a couple of weeks ago. Back then, I’d thought they were still confined to their eggs, so the tiny squeaking beaks and sightless eyes had caught me off-guard.

As can other eruptions of new life, disruptions in too-comfortable norms, that shift focus away from the daydream and into the present.

Where these small pieces of hope had finished their incubation.

And they flew.