when women were birds
I found the book in the back of a small, independent bookstore in North Carolina in winter. It was a Picador edition, with deckle edges and a beautiful photo of bird feathers on the cover. As a birder, the birds got me. I'll be honest. Make a book about birds and there's a good chance I'll read it. The book wasn't really about birds, though, as I gleaned from further inspection. It was about women, more specifically women's voices. Fantastic. I, too, am a woman. Seems like the book for me!
Joking aside, When Women Were Birds had not previously crossed my radar, but Terry Tempest Williams had, and I was curious to delve deeper into creative nonfiction after a few favorites of mine dipped into the same genre (Upstream, The Anthropocene Reviewed, etc.) I brought the book up to the counter where (presumably) the owner, an older woman with white hair in a colorful layered dress, gasped when I placed it down. "You've got some of my favorites here," she mused, pointing to the wall behind her where a quote from the book was engraved into a piece of wood. "I have this same quote carved into the steps of my front porch at home. I look at it everyday." I felt my taste validated by this sweet older woman, but didn't want to stare too long at the quote since we were in a bit of a rush (I'd dragged everyone to this bookstore and spent nearly an hour there), so I glanced quickly at it and smiled, paid, took my books, and left.
That was nearly a year ago, and I have returned to the bookstore multiple times as a source of comfort as recently as July, but I never saw the owner again. I kept forgetting to look at that quote, too enamored with the books I was buying, most of which I have yet to read. I started reading the book soon after I bought it, but for some unknown reason found it hard to get through. The book is a smaller edition (only 288 pages) and I couldn't really place my finger on why I was having trouble with it, so it sat half-read on my nightstand for months. I moved to a new apartment in August, and I took the book with me. I've been here for just over a month, and decided to pick it back up. I felt I needed to understand that older woman. Why was it her favorite book? Was there something I wasn't understanding?
Do you ever feel like a book has found you at the perfect time? I have that feeling nearly every time I choose to finish a book (I am a notorious DNFer), and I felt it within pages of beginning to read When Women Were Birds again. The beginning of the book is a meditation on Williams' mother's journals, which were left to her after her mother's passing. The meditation comes from the fact all the journals were blank. What did they mean, then? Was this some sort of message or performance on womanhood? Why buy journals all your life just to never write in them? Why leave them to your daughter? Williams turns the question over and over in her mind and on the pages in a dizzying, tangled spiral of family history and womanhood in the Mormon church. I was drawn into her world with her lyrical, spellbinding command of words, but what allowed me to finish the book in two days after not picking it up in months was the strange feeling the book had changed since I'd last read it. It seemed, now, that every sentence she uttered had something to do with me, with my life, that every word she spoke permeated some deeper part of my being and told me exactly what I needed to hear. Maybe it was I who had changed.
One day into reading the book with a quickening fury, Hurricane Helene ravaged North Carolina. Homes, historic down-towns, small businesses, wilderness, and entire towns were wiped off the map. I watched videos of the damage in Western North Carolina for hours, hunched over my desk chair and unable to fathom that the magic I found there was gone. My friends might be dead. The deer and the birds and the life, wonderful life I found there was swept away. Then, I thought about the woman. Her porch, what did it say? What words did she carve into it, now part of the thousands of pounds of debris filling up lakes and cracks in the foundations of her beautiful town? Was she okay? These are questions I cannot answer. I tried answering them by reading the book. Maybe there was something in there that could help me make sense of all this, but I couldn't pick it up without crying. It felt like I was holding a part of that woman's spirit in my hands, and I couldn't bear the thought the rest of it wasn't here anymore. As I scoured the news for any sign of hope, and as the death toll grew higher and higher, I grieved her like a relative. Like a loved one.
After a few hours, I tried picking up the book again. It felt heavier somehow, like the few pages still between me and the final sentence grew every time I looked away. I sped through, fighting tears every time Williams wandered into the realm of death or the ghosts of those we love following and changing us in their absence. As she tossed the question back and forth of her mother's journals, I too asked why. Why was this allowed to happen? What do I do now?
I finished the book late into the afternoon. As I closed it, with tears in my eyes, I realized what the woman meant about it being her favorite. I still didn't know which quote resonated with her most, which words she loved so dearly, which impacted her so strongly she took a knife in her hands and carved them into her home, and now I might never know. But I have found my own words, my own favorite quote, and I like to believe they are one in the same.
"Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated."
ʚ ═══･୨ ꕤ ୧･═══ ɞ