the man with the hammer, which I wrote down, and then crossed out, because I decided I didn't need to carry it. That was my choice. It turns out you can choose not to know something, if you're the one choosing.
This morning my mother woke me up at five, on her Sunday off, the way she did when I was nine, and we rode our bikes in the dark to Tarrywile and sat on the bench by Parks Pond, the one for the man who loved this place, and waited for the light. She had her old library-sale field guide, the Connecticut one, the one-dollar one, with the spine held together by packing tape. I had the binoculars around my neck. A little after six the green heron came out of the reeds at the far end, hunched, hands in its pockets, and stood perfectly still at the edge of the water. We watched it for forty minutes. It didn't do anything at all.
"Maybe it's not hungry," my mother said finally.
"Maybe it's waiting for the right fish."
"Maybe." She closed the book on her knee. "Maya. One day I want to take you. To Cuenca. To Calle Larga, where your grandmother lives, where you were born. And to the islands. Both. I want to stand on that boat again with you."
I looked at the heron. I thought about the drought on Daphne Major, the birds that didn't choose. I thought about how I had been wrong about that, in my essay, or at least only half right. The finches didn't choose the drought. But the two scientists with the calipers had chosen. They had chosen to go to a hard dry island and stand there, year after year, and pay attention, and write it all down, even the years when nothing seemed to be happening at all. Especially those years.
"Not yet," I said.
My mother turned and looked at me, and I saw the words land in her, those two words that she had said a thousand times, every day, for fifteen years, to keep a door closed. I watched her hear them come back out of me, and I watched her understand that I had meant something different by them. That I had picked them up off the kitchen floor like a chair that had fallen over and set them back on their legs.
"Not yet," she agreed. And then, after a moment, in Spanish, so quietly I almost didn't hear it: "But yes."
At the far end of the pond, the heron reached down into the reeds, and came up with something small and pale, a feather maybe, or a scrap of somebody's bread, and laid it on the water very gently, and waited.
So did we.