Blur
by Sara Flitner
My younger son came crashing through the front door of our Airbnb, obliterating the silence I was using to try to let my body arrive here, 3,234 miles from home, which we’d left just five days earlier. “I had to interrupt,” he exclaimed. “I knew you’d want to see the cardinal.”
I leapt to my feet because he was right. I did want to see this bird, common as a sparrow in the southeastern part of the country, but uncommon to us. Flicker of red, jaunty crown, I spied him through the leaves and his shyness.
We speak in shorthand, my sons and I, through feathers and fur. We developed this habit as they started leaving home, with some things too tender for words. Instead, I’d send pictures of a lazuli bunting at the feeder, or an osprey on the hunt in the creek behind our family home. “I’m here,” I wanted them to know. “Home is still here.” They’d answer back with a request for pictures of the dogs and the cat, both as a group and then single portraits, a way of asking for more information on the state of things without having to ask straight out.
Silas and I had set out from Jackson, Wyoming, five days earlier, with Savannah, Georgia—his new home—our destination. He had recently purchased a 2002 Chevy Astro van (white) to accommodate all the belongings he wanted to take with him. His friends and brother took bets as to how far the van would make it, but she carried us—with his bike, clothing, fishing gear, boxing gloves, guitar, and far too few linens, were you to ask—without a single complaint. Not all the hotel valets were as gracious. In Memphis, a wisp of a young man brought the car up and handed Silas the keys. “For the kiddie snatcher,” he said with an inscrutable look. We drove off to the Lorraine Motel and stared through tears at the exact spot where Martin Luther King, Jr was gunned down, a loss that traveled farther than the gunman’s bullet, across decades, across a century, to where we stood, rendered mute by the palpable loss of murdered hopes.
Silas had made a road trip checklist for us, which included learning something about each state we crossed, eating in a place that looked bad, going into a local store in a small town. We checked off both the restaurant and the store in Clarksdale, Mississippi, birthplace of the blues and one of Silas’s non-negotiable stops as we tried to whittle our sojourn into something manageable.
Pancakes at Our Grandma’s House of Pancakes were quite good, and at the Mississippi Saxophone, I listened to the proprietor give us a private concert, musing at the realization that a different version of me would have bought the custom harmonica, thinking it would inspire me to learn to play when I got home. Instead, I give the shop owner my full attention, making peace with the fact that I would I never learn to play the harmonica (and in so doing, forgiving all the things I would never do).
Back in the car, we headed for Montgomery, black vultures overhead, companions for most of the way through Kansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee.
“Look up something about the black vulture,” I said, as I drove my stretch of Mississippi. He let me drive all the easy roads and I let him pick the music, his taste being exceptional. I knew he’d find something interesting and exclaim, “Let’s gooooo,” his way of letting everything in the world be miraculous.
“They’re the clean-up crew,” he reports, as I admired them for their play, and he read on. They were constantly goofing off above us, catching currents of air, feeling warm sun on black feathers. I found his litany comforting: they were social and loyal. They didn’t mind eating leftovers. They were good parents, too. Their manners left a bit to be desired...in effort to outcompete the turkey vulture who can smell better, they force themselves to vomit, producing a smell so vile the turkey vultures lose their appetite. Clever. I saluted our escorts in the sky and snapped a picture for Pete, my older son, which would say, “We miss you.” In turn, he’d send pictures of my dogs – “our dogs,” as the boys call them, to my utter delight. Behind my back, both the boys make fun of my propensity to zoom in too close and blur the picture. Someday they will know the impossible art of bringing something into hard focus and then improving it with a blurring effect.
We drive the last stretch from Montgomery, where we’ve been gutted by the most stunning recounting of the history of slavery in America, an unflinching and gut-wrenching set of facts that set my whole self ablaze. “How can such cruelty exist?” we ask first with words. “What happens to humanity?” my heart asks no one and everyone. Then we stare out the window, and I look into all the homes that contain some number of women who love their children as I love mine, as much as the enslaved mothers loved theirs, and I go back to watching birds and saying their names out loud to Silas. Vulture, woodpecker, robin. Gull, heron, finch.
I am back in Wyoming now, watching ravens have a field day in the dumpster that the wind has blown open, and I opt to watch them for a bit before I close it. I take a picture, of course, and send it to two sons, one across the country, one across town, and give each feather of the clever bird a message to carry. Hope. Freedom. Faith. Be bold. Remember where you came from, and return. Remember where you’re going, and help it be just. Be safe. Have integrity. Bring everyone with you. It will make more sense with a broader view, through the bird’s eye. Look. Take it in. Then, act.
