Yesterday, I found the first flowers of spring and watched sparrows dart in and out of hedges. I tried to scare all of them off of their branches, but they only retreated inside of the leaves.


I remembered when my family lived in a small townhouse on Chelsea Circle, and when I walked a sidewalk block behind the house there was a small design of hedges. They seemed huge to me, when I was so tiny and dressed in a red dress with white stockings and black velvet bows in my hair, which is one of the few things I remember wearing that young. I would climb into the hedges, and somehow there were paths between the pricker branches inside that would expand to let me through to the large opening in the center, an enclosed cave of burgundy leaves and woven branches.

I also remembered the migration of the birds when I was a little older, and we lived in a new house built for us on farmland, another landmark in the manifest destiny of suburban sprawl. It was fall and my mother was pregnant with my sister. I ran outside on the front lawn with my arms outstretched, twirling around underneath a black, squawking plague of thousands of birds and my mother ran for shelter in the porch. She yelled at me to come inside because she thought I'd be shit on, but I kept spinning.