April 1st and it is the 23rd anniversary of my mother’s death. Usually I go walk the beach, to the place where we scattered her ashes and where she spent her last years, but it’s 2020 and the beaches are closed so instead I go for a walk around the block. In my seventh month of pregnancy now and my feet have started to ache from the extra weight, so the walk starts out slowly, gingerly. I conjure her here, in step beside me - Suzanne Segal, born on Friday the 13th and died on April Fool’s Day. Was that her ridiculous way of encouraging us to see some of the humor, the lightness of life? Those deep dimples and that shrieking laugh are with me as much today as they were decades ago.
Up around the corner, past the firehouse where this year there will be no Fourth of July pancake breakfast, the street begins to climb slightly. Bay trees close in overhead and a freshness meanders up from the creek below. I brought my headphones along just in case but the air blowing through the leaves distracts me from any further distractions. Something tugs at my ear, an unfamiliar sound hanging in the upper decibels. I scan the branches and see them. Two (am I even allowed such a sight?) mating hummingbirds!
Their size belies the shrillness of their voices, a sound at the intersection of where inquisitive Martian meets mosh pit of whirling dervish pixies in heat. Standing in the middle of this street in my tiny Californian town I run no risk of being run over so there I remain, jaw slack and neck craning. My mom was the overtly spiritual one, but today, eyes full of tiny feathers, I see the vastness of universe that she claimed to have seen. I see her passing away on that night twenty-three years ago when the Hale Bop comet sped overhead, right alongside this miraculous baby in my belly who since conception has been stalked by hummingbirds, next to great-grandmothers and great-great grandmothers and great-great-great grandmothers, spinning the invisible webbing that holds us all. For in some way we are all babies who grow to become mothers who birth life.
A car eventually crawls down the street, purring engine breaks my spinning into outer space and plants me firmly back on this street, in this town, staring at an empty branch on the bay tree where two birds once danced.