Or one of those: “I’m sitting on the train” posts.
I’m sitting on the 8:09, actually, heading into my freelance writing job. It’s informed my summer—this commute into Chicago, my eight hours on the 26th floor.
It’s been a summer of revising so many ways of life—and also my YA novel, While He Was Away.
Now in an upper-level seat of the quiet car, my novel just sent off to my editor, Leah Hultenschmidt at Sourcebooks, my yogurt, blueberries and almonds just eaten (I’ve yet to have breakfast at the kitchen table), I will look away from the woman sitting below me. I will, but it will be hard. She is drawing the most beautiful hummingbird—using a iPad and stylus to create a picture I’d like to keep forever. The drawing reminds me of a Japanese screen—same gentle palette and soft lines—and the woman has shaped and proportioned the hummingbird to feel delicate and, at the same time, momentous, like a mountain. There is a red spot at the bird’s breast that looks almost like a wound—the kind creatures bare without complaint, carrying on. Or perhaps it’s some kind of natural marking? It’s not clear from my vantage point—except for the fact that it only makes the bird more beautiful.
While Greg and I were waiting to bring our daughter home—that long adoption process—there was a song I came to love—“You will find your hummingbird” the lyrics go—and Magdalena has been my hummingbird ever since. So there’s that too.
At any rate, robins. And revision.
Some years ago, in the thick of emotion, I started writing a novel about a young woman whose boyfriend leaves for Iraq. A love story. A war story. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would also become a story about skeletons in the closet—those old, broken bones that clatter around and keep us from seeing each other in the flesh, face to face, as one family, whole. The young woman in the book, Penna, learns that her grandmother Justine endured a similar situation—only Justine’s war was WW II, and her young husband went to serve, and the aftermath of the experience yielded at least a few of those dry bones, Ezekiel.
It took me some time to figure out the book. It took some time the book to sell.
But then Leah at Sourcebooks took it on last January, and the revisions came early this summer, just as I started working at my freelance job.
I was eager to do my revisions. I was panic-stricken. I breathed deep. I read the manuscript over and over, making notes, cutting passages, changing words and punctuation marks. Thinking. Thinking. Remembering those characters, those settings, those conflicts, those wars.
When I first stared writing the book, Magdalena was a girl and now she’s a teenager—which granted me some new insight, too, once I got over feeling a little too close to the material for comfort. If you know what I mean. Which I’m not even sure I do.
Some time passed. I took the train, worked, read, told myself all will be well. I’ve been given a wonderful, much-needed freelance gig that our family needs. All will be well.
And it was.
I was given a reprieve from freelance. I spent a lovely week with my family and friends. And then I sequestered myself in a friend’s big, beautiful house—an upper room there—and got to work.
I worked for a week, hours upon hours a day, usually from 9 in the morning until midnight. I tried to eat well. I tried to stretch my limbs. But mostly I just sat at the desk and when I wasn’t writing or researching, I stared out the window at a bright-eyed robin in her well-constructed nest, anchored in the fork a tree only a few feet away.
I came to love that robin. I kid you not. She was a companion on the journey, steadfast and true, doing exactly what she needed to do with an intensity of focus that was inspiring. Her bright eyes kept watch on the world. She made exacting turns that I can only assume had something to do with the light, heat, wind, shadows. She fluffed and preened. She panted widely against the heat, so that I could see into her gullet. She flew away. She came back. She flew away. She came back. She sat very still.
I thought: if she can do that, I can do this.
I learned more about the two wars, though I’d been dreading it. Honestly. And then I was glad I did. I learned more about my characters. I expanded. I deleted. I found a much better ending.
Finally I said good-bye to the robin and went home to my family and then back to the 26h floor.
Now the train is coming into the stations, we are pulling into the dim, steamy tunnel, and I’m thinking of the email I got from my friend this morning—the woman who shared her upper room with me. Some days ago she wrote to say that baby robins had hatched in the nest. I hadn’t even known the eggs were there, nestled beneath my companion—but now there are two baby birds, beaks and eyes wide open. And today, my friend said Mother is doing well, the baby birds continue to grow beautifully. They seem nearly ready to fly, moving toward the edge of the nest, looking out into the larger world. So little, we creatures, but big as mountains, when looked at in love.
