Swan Song

On waking to new possibility

I heard a chickadee this morning. Three notes, clear as creekwater in the warming air. Hey sweetie! the bird sang from the privet bush as I guided River down the driveway, his hand like a daisy in mine—petaled, plump, groping for the light of me.

There’s still snow everywhere but it’s starting to retract at the edges like a sea, leaving behind a tidepool of mud, sticks, and leaves. We go looking for exposed treasures, come back with cracked black walnut shells that resemble the skeletons of small crustaceans.

The snow melts in topographical layers so that every indentation in the yard becomes visible: I can see my old footprints walking out to the studio; a crater around the football we forgot to bring inside all these months; a spatter of circular hoof marks crisscrossing up to the train tracks. The shifting season is a decoder pen, revealing what we knew all along: that the land around our home is a winter dance floor for the deer.

At the post office, everyone seems a little bit chattier, lit with a different kind of energy. I get to the coffeeshop just before close and the barista passes me a box of free pastries. As I bite into the softness of an M&M cookie, I wonder if she too heard the birdsong this morning and felt it enter her bloodstream like a sugar rush.

We are waking from a long dream.

I have spent the last two months in a kind of dream, never fully touching down at home before leaving again. Out to the Midwest, to Maine, to Europe. We’re above the clouds! I said to River on the airplane, his palm starfished against the window, and I felt the wonder of that reality as if I was experiencing it for the first time too. What does it do to the mind to hover above the clouds for hours and hours? What kind of things become possible after that?

Tomorrow, I fly to the West Coast for the final leg of tour. I will kiss the parched earth of Los Angeles. I will fling salt tears into the Pacific coast. I will light a candle in Portland in memory of the last time I performed there, on the night I learned I was pregnant the first time, a series of events that cascaded and collapsed and created the album I’m touring now. I will complete a circuit, tie off the strands of time at the end of a braid.

This may very well be my last tour. I’ve been thinking of it as a swan song. I don’t mean to be dramatic about it, and I don’t feel bitter—these shows have been so, so sweet. I’m not going to stop writing music, but something is shifting in me, as surely as the snow is melting. I am reading the map of what’s revealed, deciphering life’s impressions, discovering new treasures. I am waking from a long dream and seeing that so much is possible.

Maybe I shouldn’t call it a swan song. Maybe it’s not something so final as that. Maybe it’s really the song of the chickadee, the bird’s first words as she rouses to a new world at the end of a long season.

Hey sweetie!