let me tell you about my new neighborhood

the city, the sparrows, and the winds of chance

A month ago, we moved into our apartment on the second floor, one of four units in our building. We don’t have a balcony or a deck or our own outside space, but we have big windows that fill the place with light, and a small, shared patch of grass to park a chair in.

In our neighborhood there are churches: two tall steeples, each a few blocks away in opposite directions, reaching high above the tallest trees, that ring their bells at different times through the day. There are crows who seem to beck and call with these bells, playfully cawing back in a noticeable pattern. There’s a family of house sparrows who’ve made a home in an electrical box on the exterior wall of my neighbor’s building, and I can sometimes hear the babies cry for food, and I can always hear Papa Sparrow when he is doing his dance on the power line, screaming into the sky with his song of something I’m still not sure of, shaking his tail and vibrating his wings ardently. Last week, I found a deceased hatchling on the pavement below, and I gently moved the tiny, naked newborn to a green place where it could rest in peace.

Most buildings around us are residential, but not too far down the street is a funeral home that I can see from our couch, and sometimes I catch a few people coming out or standing around the front door, and I wonder what turn their lives have just taken, what they are currently confronting; I wonder if their loved one left anything unfinished, if their passing was a surprise, and like the cartoon scent of a pie wafting through the air, a floating wisp of everything can change in an instant, sometimes when we least expect it, reaches me and moves through my body.

I need reminders of this. The sparrows don’t.

In my neighborhood, people say hello when they pass each other on the sidewalk, most people are with a dog they’re walking, and everyone seems so, so friendly (except for one of our neighbors who is decidedly anti-dog and anti-friendly and is sort of like if a cybertruck were a person). There are two enormously fat cats that sometimes get in a fight behind our building, but their fights are really just them standing six feet apart from each other and screaming until one of them gets tired and walks away. A large rabbit lives beneath the deck next door, and she just had a baby. Chimney swifts soar in the haze overhead. My window bird feeder has yet to be discovered by most of our avian neighbors, except for a small chipping sparrow who comes for a long leisurely nosh after sunset most evenings, and a big skittish blue jay who arrives with a thud some mornings and will fly away if someone on the other side of the glass so much as blinks.

A few blocks over lives an oak tree that stopped me in my tracks when I first walked past, my jaw hanging open as I stared up in awe at the size and stature of this being — I later learned it is the oldest living tree in the area, likely several hundred years old, and I feel somehow comforted knowing she lives so close by. A large Japanese maple stretches itself up near a few of our windows which makes the views from the south side of our bedroom burgundy, and the west side green.

The west is where the storms seem to come from here (except for nor’easters, of course — we just got our first one of those), and when the wind is making the maples thrash and sway, even amongst the protection of all these buildings, when I can hear it howl as it whips through the streets, I can’t help but think of my life on the sailboat.

Living on a boat, whole days (or weeks!) were spent waiting for the fog to lift, for the low pressure system to blow over, for the sea state to stabilize. When storms rolled in, we ran around shutting all hatches and shuttered ourselves into the hot, stuffy, small cabin and waited it out, or made an unplanned sail to get into better protection, or we simply dealt with a house that rolled five degrees to port, then ten degrees to starboard, for hours and hours on end. In really severe weather, a consuming concern accompanied these adjustments, too. Will our anchor hold? Will the anchor on the boats directly upwind from us hold? No matter what we had planned or what work we needed to get done, not much beyond surrendering to/adjusting for the environmental conditions got accomplished on these days. Out there, we were never in control — the sky was, and we lived accordingly.

I’m still adjusting to how easy it is here, on land in the sturdiness of a house, for life to carry on with no regard for weather, when for four years the weather was the single axis on which my life turned. Everything about our life hinged on this fickle, oftentimes unpredictable part of the earth, and when I was in it, I found that fact to be either charming and grounding or annoying and inconvenient, depending on the day. But now back on land, I find it actually astonishing, and almost…preposterous (?) how little the weather matters, how little influence it carries, how comfortable our climate-controlled spaces are and how conditioned we’ve become to paying no mind to the sky at all, aside from ‘today is beautiful’ or ‘today is cloudy’.

a park nearby

Here in town, the human world chugs along on its own timeline, rain or shine, winter or summer. The church bells ring three times a day, the garbage trucks arrive every Wednesday morning, the cars zip past with people on their way to work during the week, rent is always due on the first on the month. There is a regularity, an orderly consistency to our human days, that when combined with homes that don’t budge in a windstorm, can create a deceptive fallacy that we are somehow not subject to the same realities that sparrow hatchlings are. Even though we live on tidy streets where the mail gets delivered every day, we also live in the wild, and are of it.

While I love much of living in a sweet little bustling town and am prioritizing embedding myself in a human community, I’m also trying to stay connected to the fluidity and flux and inherent instability of the natural world outside of our strict schedules and our cherished delusions of consistency and control. In my new neighborhood, in this new and different life, I’m trying to find the line between enjoying the comforts and safety of a house on land without allowing the walls to fully insulate me from the macrocosm.

Because in a realm much greater and far more powerful than the grids of our streets or the cadence of our clocks and workweeks, there are patterns and truths here that the birds, the rabbits, and the oaks know — they are in some sense steady and ancient, like the tides or summers, but in another sense, they are capricious and unbridled, like storms or chance.

So here, in our new little apartment on the second floor, I am keeping close much of what I learned while living on the ocean — where I was truly introduced to the earth for the first time, where I studied its moods and met the fullness of its character, where any illusions of ‘schedules’ or control were handed humbly over to the forces of the sky, where my life hung on the weather’s whims and fury, and where the fallacies of immutability were drowned out by the fluidity of the waves and forfeited to the wind.

When the westerlies beat against our windows and howl down the streets, I feel a familiar whisper push through me: one of my body’s primal connection and reverence to the sky, of our inherent risk of being alive on a dynamic, powerful planet, and that no matter where we live — in dens, nests, sailboats or apartments — everything can change in an instant, sometimes when we least expect it.

xo

Taylor

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P.S. I’ve gotten a request to record voiceovers of these essays. Is that something you would enjoy? Drop me a comment and let me know!

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to forward it along or leave a comment — I always love to hear from you.

Do you have any wild animal friends who live nearby in your neighborhood? Tell me about them!

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