Exposed

You can see the nests now, now that the leaves have all fallen. I find myself craning my head upward when I walk to determine if they are close enough to reach, thinking perhaps it might be nice to have a nest collection. Even though I'm not a collector.

The almost-winter landscape makes things appear bare and stark and angular, almost embarrassingly so, as if I walked in on someone naked. My previously-canopied yard is now exposed and several houses and mine look at each other. I like to open my blinds and see my garden when I work, but now I stare straight at three houses that I didn't see all summer. Are the people there looking in at me, sitting here at my computer, nibbling chocolate chips, talking, typing, shuffling papers, stretching? Have we all become some odd suburban version of the Hitchcock movie, Rear Window?

And speaking of Hitchcock, that brings me to The Birds. Or should I say, the bird. He's a red-tailed hawk and he perches on a spot on one of the six-foot-tall cedar fences that separate us all, these suburban homes, from which he can peer into about five different yards. He is grand, with long feathers that descend from his head and blow in the wind like a Native American headdress. He waits for an unsuspecting chipmunk to make a last mad dash across a yard, to chew my crimson clover, perhaps. And then he swoops in and snags it, its little legs dangling as it takes its final joy ride to death.

Leaves lay lifeless. Lawns turn brown. The nests, soulless and ownerless, haunt me. And as I think about my nest, this place I call home, I realize that now, more than ever, my home is connected to these others, these ones that peer at mine. Yet I don't really know some of these neighbors. How surprised they would be to discover that underneath that thick plastic in my yard that they must clearly see, a garden grows. How surprised they would be for me to share it with them as everything else around us dies.