Memory Bird: The Future of Santa Fe , NM
As raven cries above the trees, a pinecone drops. Wind races through evergreen needles. It makes the ripped canvas seem like an old bird that thrashes its wings to fly from tree to tree.
As the wind turns the canvas, it changes colors from dirty off white to the colors of the painting on the other side. A child clearly sees a mission church on the orphan canvas ripped off its stretcher by the wind. The church’s color seems to mirror the brighter color of the sun as it floats as a big orange ball in the near the horizon. Vestiges of ancient trees from a fire followed by a flood before her birth poke their silhouettes into the turbulent sky.
She runs so quickly to grasp the canvas she almost trips. When she is within a breath of the canvas, she grabs the canvas bird with an out stretched hand.
Happily, she walks quickly back down the path as she dances the canvas in her left hand. She piles it on top of other such canvas birds. Many she caught seemed to attempt to fly like wounded albatrosses dragging half-attached stretchers and frames along the ground. Some show the colors of churches and barns, some the bright colors of flowers, some the green of the forest, and most display many different colors with wild patterns running through them like the river wild in the spring.
She carefully examines her pile. The ones she deems the best she puts aside for her mother as a gift to decorate their home or to hang on a tree. The largest ones, which have few rips, she also removes even if the paint appears peeled and cracked like the bed of a dry creek. Her parents she thinks might find them useful. The rest she spreads out in the grass to imagine how to fit them together. She places several stones on each one to hold them down. At last, she again piles these canvases together and places the stones on top. She takes the ones she picked for her parents and starts home.
The next afternoon again she spreads out the pile and imagines what shapes and colors she wants to cut out. She grabs the ones she needs and begins. When it is almost dark, she leaves the canvases and returns her bone handled scissors – her favorite ones - and a pair of old but well sharpened metal ones. Taking a different path, she finds several canvas birds stranded in the junipers from their flight the day before. When she gets home, she leaves them by the door. The following day, she returns with the canvases she collected yesterday, string, thread, and a needle. With these, she carefully creates a bird made of canvas.
She examines the bird and decides the bird looks much more real than the canvases looked as birds flying in the wind. The new bird wings are a different sizes and colors as are its tail, eyes, and each leg. Still, somehow the bird to her fits together well. To her it seems better than the images from even the best pictures on the canvases that blew to her across the desert in the west wind. She imagines the bird she made as many birds: a fierce ancient bird with teeth, a bird with a wispy plume, and a raven with its black feathers catching a rainbow of colors off the sunlight. Her bird’s long leg makes her imagine a giant flightless bird. Its shorter leg reminds her of a bird that rarely walked on the ground. She looks down at the bone-handled scissors and sees the reflection of a dragonfly.
She places the canvas bird so it peers out at the path near a barberry and decides to call her creation a memory bird. The canvas pictures, which she collected, to her each contain only one memory, but her bird contains many memories just as it reminds her of many birds. When she returns her scissors and unused string and thread, the bone-handled scissors feel warmer than usual to her.
For the rest of the week and into the next she makes memory birds. She places them in different locations near her home so that where ever she walks one will greet her.
When she walks up to one, she exclaims, “that’s my memory bird! Passing it she says, “Now you belong to someone else.” It never occurs to her to own them. She feels she needs only her bone handled scissors and the memories that dance as she shapes each bird. With her scissors, she can create more birds. She is happy. What else does she need?
She also loves making clay pots. Things taste better cooked and served in them than the old metal ones. She feels food and other things look better in clay pots and she considers that important. All of the day could pass making pots except now she creates memory birds too.
Her mother, who noticed the memory birds, looks up and says “memory bird.” in the afternoon. Her child, when she finishes a pot, smiles happily and runs outside. This happens each afternoon that she makes the birds.
One day her mother follows her outside. Excited she points to a new path. A raven calls. “I hear a memory bird calling!” her mother exclaims. Her child hears the call too, smiles and replies “Remember, not just the bird speaks, but the voice of the memories.” Her mother adds, “The new path is a good one and not too long.”
“I know,” replies her child, “I can see.”
As she walks down the path with the bird she finished the day before, she comes to a giant metal skeleton with wheels. Part of the skeleton includes a metal shell. “Someone went backwards!” she exclaims. “They learned the joy of working with another animal then did nothing more than move around in a thing with no brain. She looks at the skeleton and near it sees what appears to be a very dirty rock. Beneath it, she notices something deep yellow and something else that could scatter sunlight like a swarm of yellow butterflies on a summer day.
She picks up the objects, puts them in her pocket, and imagines similar objects lined up on a soft dark blue cloth. How silly she thinks, so many identical things made by so few hands.
With her fingers, she brushes away nearby leaves. There she finds dry flecks of different colored paint and scraps of rotten canvas. On one scrap, she barely discerns the image of the head of a small bird. Amazed she wonders, another painting of a memory bird. She examines the skeleton more closely. Was this their memory bird?Someone knew. She places the memory bird near the skeleton and claps her hands and smiles. She names it the Wheeled Turtle Mother Memory Bird.
She glances back at her latest memory creation. A piece of canvas on the underside of the left wing catches her attention. It reminds her of a piece of canvas that fascinated her on the tail of her first memory bird. To get a better look she lifts up the wing of her latest bird. There it is, she wonders, how could I miss it, a painted image of a memory bird? Why did whoever made it not make it three dimensional to hold more memories? She imagines pictures of memory birds in a line as far as the eye could see, each with one memory. She wonders, Lots of memories, but why did one have to create so many birds to hold them all?
Still, unlike the faded representations of churches, barns, trees, flowers and colored shapes, she sees something more in the painted image of the bird. She looks again at the painted image and imagines its memory. While the memory seems simpler than in the birds she made, still something about it fascinates her. It not only contains a memory of a bird but a memory of her. Hazy yes, but there it is. She wonders, was I there ordid whoever paint it, see into the future? On impulse, she raises her hand, fingers outstretched. She feels someone’s fingers touching hers and sees only the faintest light where their hand would to be.
When she returns to her mother, she asks, “Can I see a real old memory of myself? How can someone in the past leave a memory about the present?
Her mother says, “Some things still live in the heavens as rain exists in the clouds before it falls to the ground. Sometimes like fog a part of those things can come closer, so someone living in the past catches a glimpse.” She points down at a place where the ground is very dark and continues. “Soon their memories sank into the earth. Often we do not touch them because we cannot go or return there. Past things in the earth are of course in darkness. Yet, even in darkness lightning strikes and for a moment you see these things. Did I not name you Levina after lightning for a reason?”
Silently they watch as the sunset and the moonrise behind juniper hills, stars appear and, at last, the Milky Way emerges looking like a river across the sky. Even in the shadows. they still see the colors of the forest. Finely her mother asks softly, “Think carefully, did you ever dream of a picture of the memory bird?
After a while her child replies, “Yes, sort of. I saw a funny looking black bird with a crest like a jay only different. It flew toward me and swallowed me. Inside it, I traveled through a tunnel and came out in a different place. I danced there and became different people as my clothes changed. It was like when I now look at a memory bird, I see the images of many birds. Are these dreams where I got the idea for the memory bird?
“Ideas have a home,” her mother replies, “just as you and I have a home and raven has a nest. Always remember in dreams our ideas can have a home too and our ideas create our home. We all come and go from somewhere.”
Her child picks up a piece of canvas she missed seeing in the days before. She imagines on it what might be the worn image of still another memory bird. She turns it over and sees the same image in reverse on the back. As she runs down the path pretending the canvas is a bird in flight she sings, “In Dreams, dreams I find my home. In home, home, I find my dreams.” |
