Knitting, Pickleball, Birds

two is for mirth

Pioneertown, October 2020. Some birds demand to be noticed

It’s a joke, but I can’t find the origin and I am in a coffee shop so I don’t look too far into it. When you reach your fifties, you get sorted into a new hobby. You don’t choose: it chooses you. Will it be pickleball, knitting, or bird watching? When I look, I see jokes about your thirties, when you get to choose between sourdough, romantasy, and plant parenthood. Like most jokes it’s at least a little true, and the women my age in Fika prove my point for me as I sit down to write. They discuss their grown children and who they are dating (the romance with Brooklyn: ON AGAIN!) and then someone mentions what happened at Pickleball on Wednesday.¹

I don’t play pickleball, but I was pickleball adjacent on my cruise in January. My friends play. Sandy has chosen this exact ship for the pickleball court, and she is not alone. There is drama, because there is a group of sixteen who did the same thing, came on this cruise for the pickleball, reserved the courts for certain hours. Were they given too much time? I learn about rackets, and I watch this woman blatantly cut in line (there’s a system where you put your rackets in line in groups of four). I have don’t have good vision (and the accompanying hand/eye coordination) or any real interest in learning myself; I am a runner and happy to stay that way. But I can cheerlead and agree that the blond lady was cutting in line. I watch Jody play barefoot. Why wasn’t he wearing shoes again? Oh that’s right; I don’t care.

I don’t knit either. Or crochet, and I only know the difference in theory.² My sister in law’s sister Serena knits beautifully (gorgeous sweaters!). Mette’s crocheted pieces are more art than blanket. My friend Ann knits (I think it’s knits) me a beautiful blue bag for my birthday. She remembers that blue is my favorite color. This sounds like something I should do because I am so fidgety as a person. I could be knitting! Except I’ve tried a couple of times and have no interest. Maybe I am too ADHD.

Yesterday I am walking and I see it: the bluebird, the one that lives by the library. That’s when I understand that I have become a person who knows that a bluebird lives by the library, near the butterfly garden. I hardly ever see it, though. A handful of times is all. It is on the ground, then flies up to the top of the tree, calling (singing would be a generous interpretation of this sound).

the best picture I can get

I know where the bluebird lives and I feel obligated to say hi to crows.³ I have ambitions to take this further someday, to bring them food and train them as a crow army. I shall bring them peanuts and they shall bring me jewels from afar!

So, I guess it’s birds for me.

The reasons this happens in your fifties: when you have school age children you have no time for any of this. You are making dinner, driving to soccer practice and girl scouts and cross country meets. Solving arguments like whose turn it is to be on the Xbox and which child gets the “good” straightener (maybe only a 2010s parent problem?) this weekend when they are all going different places. Likely working a full time job on top of that. I know where the bluebird lives now because I have a typical walk I take during my lunch when I work at home, a walk that goes by the library. I do vary my route and I don’t walk there every day, but I walk there a lot. My children are grown. I have time to notice one bluebird, six crows (hi crows!), two squirrels, three rabbits. When my older three children are teens I work retail, on my feet all day, so during my lunch I sit and read - outside weather permitting, but with my face in a book I don’t see the birds. When my youngest child is a teen I am going back to school falling in love, starting a new career. step-parenting.⁴ When would I knit?

I already had hobbies and of course these are not the only ones. I always liked puzzles, but started doing them fanatically during the early days of the pandemic and never stopped. I have always read, as soon as a I could. I’ve been in the same bookclub for twenty-nine years. I have always sung. Show choir in high school, church choir now. I have nearly always exercised, though when my children are young this means aerobics at church where I can bring them and nurse my baby if I need to.

I have always, always written, since I could write. I make my own books with paper, markers, and scotch tape. I write in journals in high school, and I start reviewing romance novels in my twenties and continue that for twenty years. I add blogging when that becomes a thing. I write my husband letters every night. Then he dies and I write a book. And I write this.

I fit all of these in with young children. But there is less time to notice birds.

What would Mike have done, had he lived to be fifty? Or my parents? Or his? I have so few videos, so little with his voice, but I do have this. We are camping together, just the two of us. He has a little over two months left to live. He sees a woodpecker and wants me to film it because his phone is in the camper, so it is down to me. I do not have a video of my husband saying “I love you, baby,” but I can hear him say “woodpecker” in a deliberately hushed tone. and now you can too.

Aspen, July 2018

My dad would have picked pickleball. He already played tennis, so it’s a short leap. My mom already sewed, famously. I think she would have sewed more, not less. And my husband? He already noticed the woodpeckers. He noticed nearly everything. He would have taken our grandchildren camping, taught them to fish as he taught his children.

What does it mean, to see a bluebird at the library (or to have a bird land on your head, for that matter)? A bluebird is supposed to be lucky, they say. For crows, it depends how many there are. My children had a book about crows, based on an old poem:

One is for Sorrow

Two is for Mirth

Three for a funeral

Four for a birth…

The internet says it is sometimes magpies, the origin obscure. We have been finding meaning since we have been finding birds, probably. Are cardinals and hummingbirds your dead loved ones saying hello? When I see five crows together, is it my parents, in-laws and Mike in bird-form?⁵ Is that single robin my dead brother? Yes and no and maybe, I think. It means what we want it to mean, and I’ll die on that hill. You can find someone else’s meaning silly or ridiculous if you want, but I can’t see how it’s hurting anything. We could use more messages and more meaning, to my way of thinking.

And a calling bluebird at the library is no bad thing.

1. Sit by me at your own risk.

2. I looked it up again but I promise to forget tomorrow.

3. I also say hi to fish when I snorkel. I can’t help it.

4. Also worth noting: those hobbies for thirty year olds are all best suited for thirty year olds without children.

5. Cue a hilarious mental image of my husband in a crow costume