For thousands of days, I have woken to birdsong. The street where I grew up is flush with trees, some a century thick, that provide home to robins, cardinals, house finches, and mourning doves cooing in the blue-black of early morning. These birds scatter in my wake on morning walks. They snip at each other on telephone poles and build nests in porch eaves and tree branches, out of paper straws, mud and twigs, and fine threads of plastic. In the summers, fearsome storms come rolling in the afternoons and blow these careful homes to pieces. I’ll find bits of newspaper and feathers in the gutters. I’ll notice when nests go missing and when they reappear a few branches higher.
I love to watch the rain, to rush to the rocking chair by my window and curl tight as the sky darkens and trembles. I love listening to the sound of birds’ caws quivering up, faster and faster, and marvel at how they can possibly live like this—constantly rebuilding, not knowing when the next predator or lightning strike will come. I don’t understand how they can keep laying eggs in the wind’s path.
***
It is the end of my final summer before senior year, the last one clearly defined by the bounds of school on either side, and I am watching robins with my brother.
Mount Pleasant, with its stony green slopes and abundance of porches, is the kind of neighborhood that makes you forget you are in the heart of DC proper. After spending my childhood witnessing my brother shuttle between schools up and down the coast, I’m still not used to thinking about him in one place. But now he has settled, a soft-nosed labrador and two small children tying him to this house for years and years. Now I am the one who comes and goes.
My sister-in-law flits past us—a flash of blue linen and dark hair. She produces object after object from her endless canvas bags, affixing small, neat labels in brown masking tape to diaper bags and pantry goods. My brother laughs good-naturedly. She’s nesting. A fluttering of limbs, sticks and cloth, clean pillow cases, and ceramic plates.
I watch her as my brand-new nephew grows heavier by the minute in my arms, his small red hands, his socked feet, his open mouth all arching into one long curl before settling into an empty sleep.
She breezes by me—moving quickly for a woman two weeks postpartum—and I can’t imagine what could possibly be so urgent. Their home is already perfect. The living room is flushed with lamplight, my niece’s fairy wings are tucked neatly behind the front door, and the crib upstairs smells like new wood.
My brother laughs low at something his wife said, and I don’t want to leave, don’t want to return to the anxious quiet of my own house. I’ve been moody and unproductive these days. It is August and I can’t bear anything—not the footsteps of my parents, not the heat, not the mindless hours opening and closing books, waiting for events to approach, to occur. I am here but not here. There is somewhere else I am about to be.
***
We signed our lease for senior year almost a year ago, in September, with months of dorm living left for us to daydream about what comes after. On every run through Fox Point, every icy trek back from Coffee Exchange, I would spare a glance for our home, not yet ours, and let myself imagine fresh flowers kept in a vase on the desk and shelves filled with small tokens: my rings, ceramic dishes, books.
It was the daydream of homemaking, of presiding over dinner parties and watching movies on a real TV, that enchanted me. Spoken to my friends, it felt like a promise. Something firm to hold onto as the end of our Providence years began to sharpen into focus.
***
I didn’t know what to call the impatience, the sharp desire to return to a home I hadn’t lived in yet and prepare myself for the year to come, more intense than any year before.
I thought of my sister-in-law, determined to overhaul her entire pantry in the early days of motherhood, and the word that my brother had diagnosed her with. The nesting instinct—a little bit science, a little bit folklore—describes the urges that strike new mothers to build out their homes, to organize, clean, and make ready for babies to come. Dozens of blogs (ones with words like “bump” and “momma” in their title) list the side effects of nesting in late pregnancy—including intense bursts of energy and a desire to stay rooted in the house. The American Pregnancy Association explains that expectant mothers should not be surprised “if just being home takes on a new meaning.” Like geese or crows, we scout for the perfect location to build nests. We flock tightly with the people we trust, seeking safety.
The entire premise of nesting in pregnancy is slightly suspect, rooted in essentialized preconceptions about female biology and motherhood. But there’s something about the idea that sticks with me, a birdlike charm that is difficult to shake: the desire to burrow in, to make foreign territory into a home fit for growing.
***
My first night of senior year is a hot, strange one. I cross the threshold of our sprawling Fox Point apartment into a maze of unidentifiable smells and broken furniture. The grand ceilings that let in so much sun during the daytime have turned cavernous in the dark; the rooms are full of shadows and my imagination is wild. I force myself into sleep and dream the vivid dreams of a new bed. It isn’t until after the third fitful night that I recognize the feeling of waking up.
One by one, my housemates arrive like pigeons to roost. We are giddy and a little delirious from the heat and the stink of dust and bleach. I want to feed everyone. Simple things—waffles with peanut butter, apple slices, eggs and toast.
For a week, all we do is clean, the hems of my jeans soaked through with soap and water. My knees chafe from hauling furniture, scrubbing at kitchen shelves, working with utmost concentration until my armpits and calves and temples sting with sweat. Feverishly, I imagine my sisters felt this way in their pregnancies, driven to build dressers and reorganize pantries with a fanatical devotion, feeling children on the way. Immediately, I cringe at imagining myself anywhere close to motherhood while eating toast off of a paper towel.
Still, I am grateful for it all. I know that these are precious days—nesting days—before paper deadlines and 9 a.m. classes and job interviews. The most pressing tasks are ones that can be accomplished with bare hands and bottles of bleach and car rides to Target and Savers. Slowly, the strange dishes in the cupboards become our dishes. We chip the edges of counters, smudge mirrors with our fingerprints, and fill the kitchen with the smells of coffee and salmon and sweet potato. We sleep on clean, hard-earned mattresses. We leave our shoes by the door.
***
I was never good at that kind of stuff, my mother mused every time we left my brother’s. She was talking about nesting, about my sister-in-law’s perfect house and expert hand. It’s something some women just have a sense for.
I didn’t agree with her, but couldn’t figure out the words to say so. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was something you could lack, the desire to make yourself at home. My dissent came in flashes of memory: the ceramic cups for soft-boiled eggs she kept in the kitchen, my painting from second grade framed in the living room, the paper birds she bought me from Maine.
When I make my new bed with the down comforter we picked out together and string the paper birds along my window, I send a photo to my mother immediately. I think what I should have told her is that I always knew I was safe in our home, even when she felt it was inelegant or unmade. I wanted to imitate nearly everything she had done, to roll up my sleeves and love my friends with clean bathroom floors and recycled shopping bags and mugs of tea, the way she loved me.
***
Maybe I also should have told her about birds, perhaps the most capable homemakers in the world, and their dwellings that are as wild and diverse as the species themselves. Robins build their small, careful nests low to the ground, cleaning religiously and sounding sharp calls whenever an approaching predator threatens them. Bald eagles return to the same nests year after year, laying pounds and pounds of grass and wood atop each other to create a stronghold for their massive eggs. If one collapses, it is simply rebuilt later on. Male bowerbirds build too—but not for their children. Their nests are towering, sculptural things, made with bright bits of cloth and bottle caps in the hopes of attracting a mate.
My housemates and I spend hours deliberating over where to place our prints and lay our rugs. We burn candles and plan parties that may never come to fruition. There is nothing economical about the way we make our homes, spending time, sweat, and money on picture frames and flowers. We have no one to raise but ourselves.
***
September is slipping by and the dark comes a little quicker now, with a little more bite. When I turn towards home in the evenings, the streets of Fox Point unfurl before me, triple-deckers filled with yellow light and the sounds of cooking.
I’ve been thinking about my littlest nephew again, how he will grow up with his whole childhood sprawling out from the walls of my brother’s house. He will know the trees and robins outside his bedroom as well as his own name.
I don’t know where I will be in nine months. Our apartment, stripped back to its bones, will be a place that we lived in for a short time together. Someone has already signed next year’s lease and my stomach hurts a little at the thought. I pick up my pace and follow Hope Street like a sparrow down a gully; I can smell a storm coming.
I don’t have a baby to raise. But there’s something else, fierce and warm, that is growing just as quickly. I want a soft place for it to live until the wind blows through.
