to draw that after my nap . . . aren’t they awful flowers? Leave my pad close. Can’t you remember to get some grapes? Now get out of here, what do you want hanging around a dying woman. I won’t need you until evening. And get this damn budgie off my bed, off you go Henry.”
My mother kept twelve budgies and two African Gray parrots. She let all of them fly free in the house. The oldest was Moore, a hand-raised but otherwise ordinary green and yellow budgie. She got him after I left home. She clipped his wings and trained him to land on her bottom lip and peck at her teeth. Slowly his flight feathers grew in again but by then he liked being near her, on her head, her shoulder, her fork. She talked to him all the time but he never learned to speak words back. He clung stubbornly to his squawky budgie locutions, especially when we ran water or closed the back door on its rusting hinges. Now that she was sick, Moore perched on the curtain rod in my mother’s bedroom most of the day, and flew at my head whenever I came into the room.
My mother built a large aviary into a wall in the sunroom off the kitchen and added a pretty white and blue budgie called Miranda. The young bird tried to fly at first but she kept bumping into windows and falling stunned to the floor. So Miranda made her world the large cage whose doors were always open and managed to breed with Moore. Her babies learned to fly around the house and each late afternoon when I fed them, Miranda squawked to the others to come back and sat chatting all evening with whoever stayed. My mother regularly visited the bird barns at the Safari during the off season. She liked trading bird talk with the trainers who specialized in parrots and hawks and kestrels. She charmed them with her stories of Moore and Miranda, and when they had a space problem one winter they asked her if she’d board a couple of African Grays along with her budgies.
The Grays were the colour of clean wood smoke with crimson tails and yellow-rimmed pupils. My mother’s pair hung upside down from the living room curtains or spent hours grooming each other on a perch she’d constructed for them in front of the couch. They never responded to their names so my mother called them any paired names she thought of. When she wrote me letters and referred to Abelard and Heloise, or Jesus and Mary, I knew she was talking about the Grays. They were friendly with her and let her scratch between the rows of feathers on the backs of their necks, but they were suspicious and skittish with me. They’d already torn holes in all the curtains and I pushed them off the kitchen counters where they scratched the cupboards foraging for sweet cereals. They stood staring at me defiantly with those intelligent, uncanny eyes and fretted when I sent them scrambling away. One of my endless small chores since coming home was to gather and wash fresh maple and alder twigs for their wooden stand in the living room.
When my mother finally called to tell me about her illness she said, “Soph, they said I’m going to die. I don’t know who’s going to take care of the birds. Do you think you could come home for a while?”
I said I’d be on the next plane and she said, “Oh, I won’t die today,” and laughed, and I knew she was relieved. But she wasn’t ready to die and it was taking longer than we both had thought it would. We hadn’t lived under the same roof for years, and after the initial shock, we had to settle into the daily business of waiting. The afternoons when she slept were endlessly long and the wakeful nights longer. I was thirty years old and I still felt as though everything was ahead of me. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever been tied down.
I took aimless walks along Safari Road, staring at the fields and the horse farms buried in snow. Sometimes, during those brief blue twilights, too cold to stay out and too reluctant to go in, I walked around the outside of my mother’s house, trying to absorb a bit of warmth from the bricks. I’d stand until I was chilled