Neither Stopped to Explain

The finches never asked permission. They arrived on the porch in Dublin in June, built a nest over the one door we never use, and raised their young in full view of our living room window without so much as a nod in our direction. We did not invite them. There was no vetting, no committee vote, no permitting for the nest. They assessed the porch, decided it would do, and moved in. We spent the whole summer on one side of the screen, and they spent it on the other, and together we watched the World Cup. I'm confident they were pulling for Spain. They are the correct color.

I didn't know this until I looked it up: every house finch east of the Rockies descends from a small flock released near Mineola, Long Island, about eighty years ago. Sellers had smuggled and sold them under a prettier name, then got nervous and let them go. No map. No permission to be anywhere. They followed the watershed north, up the Connecticut River Valley, until they reached New Hampshire in the 1980s, where they stayed.

The same water that feeds our pond back home had long since sent these birds toward this porch, eighty years before I arrived to find them here. They didn't know they were tracing my route in reverse. I didn't know I was following them back.

On Monday, with a few days still left before we head south, I met a black bear ambling along the tree line across the driveway on the Dublin School campus. I stopped the car and didn't move. I barely breathed. It wasn't fear, or not only fear.

It was a particular stillness that comes when you're in the presence of something too large to hold onto, almost incomprehensibly large, majestic and frightening, and your body knows before your mind does to go quiet and let it pass through you. She looked my way once. Just once, and briefly, before returning to whatever had her attention in the first place, as if she'd confirmed the Tesla wasn't worth further notice. Whatever she was doing there was complete in itself, asked nothing of me, and needed no witness to be real. I have rarely felt smaller, or more grateful for the one look I got.

Leaving is emotional for me. And leaving both of them this Thursday feels like more than packing a car.

But the finches left first.

Sometime this week, ahead of the rain that soaked us Monday through Wednesday, they caught the better weather and moved on without waiting for me. The porch has been quiet since. No lingering, no proper goodbye. They read the sky and went. They already made this exact journey once, eighty years ago, from the harbor I'm driving back to. Even in their leaving, they seem to say: wherever you're headed, we were already there.

One glance from the tree line. An empty porch before the rain came. Nothing more explained than that. I'll take it as enough.

A Prayer

God of the porch and the tree line, you who fill creation so completely that some of it doesn't need us to notice, and you who send small companions ahead of us even in their leaving: teach us to hold awe and belonging together, without needing either one explained. Grant us grace to trust that we are already home before we arrive. With Christ, who is at home in every place, and who walks beside us now, from New Hampshire to Cold Spring Harbor and every threshold between. Amen.