The birds are flying north

This morning I woke up early to the sound of birds and the feeling of my muscles contracting in that cyclical way. The birds are calling out ancient territory patterns in the midst of the suburban fences, and my body is working away phantom children in an era that considers me nearly a child myself. I guess two hundred years ago these birds would have been staking out redwoods and eating plants that don't grow here anymore, bugs that don't fly here anymore. And I would have been raising children on an island in the North Sea, or I suppose maybe in some part of the American South, depending on how I deconstruct myself. Instead, after listening to the morning songs and rubbing my belly for an hour or so, I put on a sweatshirt that used to belong to an ex-boyfriend. I came downstairs with my laptop and made some coffee using the unlikely combination of my housemate's gourmet-style coffee grinder and the Mr. Coffee that's dependent on duct tape in order to function. I took some ibuprofen and settled in on the couch. It's 7am in Berkeley, California. San Francisco is turning pink across the bay, but here the light is still slate blue.

Lately I've been nostalgic for Pennsylvania. Northwestern Pennsylvania, to be exact, south of Erie and north of Pittsburgh. I went to school there for three years, once you subtract my JYA. It was a place of long snows and rampant rust belt style decay. Forty minutes away from my town with its small commercial toe-hold on the world, the mansions of the US' first oil barons slumped lazily under the care those left by the dried up wells. Where I lived, apparently the train used to stop between Chicago and New York. There was an opera house. Now there are a few local businesses that are slowly closing out to the chain stores, and two factories outside of town that keep the employment rate at least above 50%. It doesn't sound like the kind of place you'd miss, but it is. It's a location I struggled with, and came to love in a barbed and protective way.

Location nostalgia is a normal state of being for me, at this stage. I've lived in enough places now that my idea of home is all mixed up with elements of each one. In France, I once met an artist--an American expatriate, in his late 70s, who had been in France for several decades. "I don't travel anymore," he told me. "Everywhere you go, you leave a piece of your heart. I'm too old for that now. I can't give away any more of my heart."

I thought I knew what he meant then, but the peculiar kind of pain he was describing becomes clearer to me every year that I continue to live the way I do. For the most part, though, it's a pleasant ache. I'm only 25 and I can live with the fallout of movement: lost people, lost places. Sometimes, all I want in the world is to see a certain street, or smell a particular plant, and I know that that thing I am craving is thousands of miles away. Sometimes all I want to do is talk to someone in person who is farther away than my mind grasps. It's nostalgia though, not pain: nostalgia is semi-sweet because it relates also to knowing that you had something once, and you are thankful enough to want it again. The sharp part comes from always feeling like a piece of you is missing. A piece of your heart, maybe, if we are to believe my artist, and I think that I do.

So it comes in waves, and these days it's Pennsylvania. Over all of the starkness of that part of the world, the beauty is entering my recent days. This weekend, at a gathering in Golden Gate Park, some Canada geese flew overhead. I remembered going to the bird sanctuary outside of town one day in the fall in Pennsylvania to watch the migrants passing. The geese were the only ones I saw, floating in a pond by the entrance, because I came from a world with no hunting season. It was only after I arrived at the sanctuary that I looked down and realized that I was, for all intents and purposes, disguised as a deer in my nice little brown suede jacket. So I watched the orange-covered walkers come and go, and I watched the geese, and I listened to the gun shots echoing in the hills, and I thought about how little I'd seen compared to those birds.

Then last night, grating potatoes, a friend put on a singer I hadn't heard before. It was Pennsylvania Music, to me, although I don't quite know how to describe that. Heart lyrics, poetic. Celtic and bluegrass, folk. It made me want to call someone from that time in my life, but I didn't. I would have wanted to talk about nostalgia, but that's a hard thing to share over the phone.

So many other things are in my head recently. Fresh tomatoes from the farmer's market, which is still the best market I've ever been to (it's what all these urban markets are trying to copy, but they'll never get it down). The way that the first day of spring feels after going so long without any nourishment from the atmosphere. The crispness of fall. And the people I knew: my friends, my professors, and somehow most of all the family that ran the sandwich shop I worked at. These things are on my mind. Then, this morning, I woke up and all that I could think about as I lay there aching and listening to birds was the Sand County Almanac. So I got out of bed, because I craved silence for the first time in months.