The Eurasian penduline tit weaves plant fibers and fluffy seeds into nests so soft and strong
children in Eastern Europe have worn them as slippers. Who says slippers don’t grow on trees.
As a child I made slippers for my whole family, secretly crocheted for weeks
a color between kelly and forest. I never finished
my father’s. He only got one, so large he thought it was a hat. That’s how big
he was in my child-mind, back when I lived
inside it. The slipper looked like a joke, but it took me earnest hours to crochet so far beyond
what would have cupped his foot. Would he have lasted longer if I’d made two?
Back before slippers, four-year-old me sits under his arm as his finger traces the line of words
in The Burgess Bedtime Story Book, pink and hard-bound, forest animals doing forest things
while wearing clothes. I loved my dad. Like most,
he was not a perfect parent. Search Great Parents of the Ages
and you get parents of men who led armies on horseback across the steppes
or ruled the Roman Empire. Or parents, great because they discovered radium while their
children ate alone in another room. No one is famous for their private life if it remains
truly private. The edible nest swiftlet spends weeks constructing white nest cups
with layers of its own saliva. Lick by lick. I remember holding a tissue and saying blow,
drippy noses, mouths spitting up on my shoulders, chest, back,
once drenching all of me in vomit. The diapers, leaky. Everything fluid. Nest
is process, place, and what it holds. People fall to their deaths collecting swiftlet nests
for bird’s nest soup. Nest, in this case, the sauce and not the saucer.
One golden-headed tanager built a nest in an excavated honeycomb.
Imagine—cradled in honeycomb perfume.
But I only know this because someone took it apart.
We had nests for the hens who came running to greet us whenever we came home
until a stray dog killed them all. The children wept and I couldn’t console them.
I’d taped a gingerbread boy back together to save a child from grief,
but I couldn’t tape the hens. How long is forever? A white stork built a nest in 1549,
and it lasted 400 years. Maybe the oldest nest ever in constant use. How many
broken cookies. How many slippers. How many bowls of soup.
Now they are all on the bed, windows wide, and she is reading aloud. She loves
the words in her mouth. How she can pull the story into the air, a seemingly endless thread
unspooling. How it holds them. A rooster crows outside. The sky ticks.
The trees expand in the forest green. A jay glances around, under the roof gutter,
ducks into its hidden temporary room. Keep reading, mommy, says a child’s voice
when she pauses. And she resumes.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Kelly Terwilliger is the author of two collections of poetry, a forthcoming chapbook and a forthcoming hybrid book combining poetry, painting, and prose. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, and Britain. She recently won first prize in the Guernsey International Poetry Competition, and her award-winning poem is happily travelling around on buses in the Channel Islands. A residency at PLAYA has furthered her work on a collaborative manuscript about swimming in wild places. She teaches and performs as an oral storyteller in public schools in Eugene, Oregon.
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