But there were other writers whose bodies of work I had my eyes on. I had only read a few of Morrison’s books and always meant to return to her. Maybe a big read of one great author would mend my lonesomeness, too. Transitions are always thorny no matter how much they are welcomed or needed. I pined for my old life, to eat Joe’s pizza and New York City bagels. I missed my oldest son, family, and girlfriends. I was a stranger in a village, a brown girl in a white town. A few weeks in, a deep loneliness engulfed me. I had just moved to New Hampshire with my youngest son and husband, who’d been recruited to teach at an elite boarding school. She’d been grieving her husband’s death and the experience lifted her spirits. A friend told me about a big read she did of Joan Didion’s body of work. I first met Morrison in the wondrous place where writers and readers connect. Toni’s unconventional suggestion eloquently summed up her influence on my life by reminding me that in order to claim and protect my space from trespassers, I had to be courageous, intentional, and if needed, an outlaw. I don’t own a shotgun and perhaps that wasn’t her point. This lets them know that they are not to shit on your space anymore. Only a few rounds though and never directly at the birds. She replied: “Take a shotgun, and when you see the birds come close, shoot a couple of rounds into the air. “What was her secret to keeping her pier and balconies so clean?” Toni’s house, meanwhile, with wraparound porches and a long white pier that extends a hundred feet into the river, was always sparkling and spotless-a wonder considering the number of ducks and gulls that lived on her property and traveled overheard. White-winged Doves, pelicans, and pigeons that fly around my house in Puerto Rico, which is situated next to a lush nature reserve on the island’s northeast coast, were always sullying my balcony. I teasingly called her the “bird whisperer.” So when I had a bird-poop problem a few years ago, I sought her advice. She planted with butterflies and birds in mind. A sturdy shrub that came from a cutting of Nelson Mandela’s bush was among her most beloved possessions. She tended vegetable gardens and sweet-smelling flowering plants like roses, geraniums, lilies, among many other beauties. “After that how could I be content with one simple color?” The plant world was another great passion. As a little girl in 1938, she looked up at the night sky of Lorain, Ohio, and saw the northern lights, an event that would inspire her writing life: “I remember that most shocking, most profound event,” she said of the dazzling show in the essay The Writer Before the Page. Memories of her childhood experiences in nature made their way into her writing. The novelist, reared on the banks of Lake Erie, was a lifelong nature lover and sky-gazer. Like ghosts emerging from the river, Toni loved it best when birds visited her. Instead Toni marveled on what was happening outside her doorstep-the river, the trees, and the sublime gifts of the morning hour, which included scores of local and migrating birds. (Once I gave her Birders: The Central Park Effect, a documentary about New York City birders who go to great lengths to catch a rare sighting. While she understood the longing to see birds, efforts to time a trip for one that may or may not show up sounded too complicated for her taste. And she surely did not join birding groups. She did not go on hikes or trek to faraway places in search of exotic sightings. Yet as much as Toni revered birds, she was not a traditional birder. To my joy, I got to be a bird nerd with the celebrated author. Spiritually, the bond endures.Įvery time I visited Toni, birds somehow winged their way into our conversation, and we’d spend precious moments exchanging stories about our avian adventures. On the calendar, our friendship was fleeting. A few months later, she invited me to visit with her at her home, a magical boathouse along the Hudson River where a ghost named Beloved visited and where she wrote and dreamed until her passing one year ago. I met Toni when I interviewed her for The Pieces I Am, a film about her art and life.
I had the great fortune of experiencing how she treasured them in her everyday life. Deep readers of the visionary novelist Toni Morrison appreciate the significance of birds in her work-they show up everywhere in her illustrious canon.