Originally published by Memoir Land

Memoir Land: Something to Believe In

It’s been months and she still hasn’t quit. She started in June while we were wandering Paris, addicting ourselves to fancy French butter and chouquettes, small sugared pastries we bought by the bagful.

There’s a bird, our Airbnb guests emailed from New Orleans, that keeps flying into the glass of your kitchen window.

I’ve seen birds hit glass. They drop to the ground, dead or stunned. I’ve held them and sung mantras to them. Sometimes they’ve flown away. Often they haven’t. Still, there wasn’t much we could do from Paris, so we ate our butter and pastries and hoped for the best.

In mid-August my husband and son returned home while I flew to California for a conference. When I joined them after a week, they insisted they’d tried everything: paper bird cutouts, tin foil covering the window.

She was a cardinal, buff-brown with a black mask and cartoonish orange bill, and when she wasn’t hogging the birdfeeder or perched in the Japanese Maple, she was a frenzied, territorial mess, attacking her reflection every few seconds. I knew what to do. I cut out my own construction-paper birds, convinced they’d be superior, and taped them up. For a few hours, she stopped.

Some weeks I heard nothing from her. Then she’d reappear, careening into the windowpane every few seconds. I’d rearrange my bird outlines and rap on the glass and tell her to quit. She’d flutter off but return. Eventually we settled into a rhythm. She thwacked the window, I rattled it. She thwacked, I rattled.

READ THE WHOLE ESSAY HERE

(This article is not available online)