The World in the Cherry
In April, I noticed a robin's nest...
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Seven years ago, just after we bought our house, I spent a whole damp March weekend digging up the five willow trees that had been planted—far too close—by the contractors who'd renovated and flipped the place a few years before. The work was muddy, relentless, and backbreaking, but still pleasing. Ripping out the tenacious roots of the ugly, sprawling little trees that were already pressing hard against the house felt like an act of ownership and righteous renunciation. In their place, we planted climbing hydrangeas, a holly, a lilac to scent the front entrance in mid-spring and, as a last-minute thought, a semi-dwarf cherry tree right on the corner of the lot. The little sapling was entirely unimpressive: not much more than a three-foot stick, tufted with haphazard leaves, shoved into the earth.
It remained just as undwhelming for the next three years, questing out a modest shock of branches every spring and turning a cheerful yellow come fall, but never rising much higher than our heads. And then, drawing on patiently established roots, it suddenly had a banner year, leaping upward and, in the space of a few short springtime weeks, declaring itself a tree, decking its branches with delicate and white flowers at the beginning of May and setting a drapery of fine red fruit in July. It has now far exceeded even our wildest guesses about the height it would attain, easily screening our second-floor bedroom windows and, as it turns out, providing a world fascination during the open-window season that runs from late April to mid-June. A world of fascination, because the tree is a world in itself.
Since it catches the morning sun, the cherry is a favorite haunt of songbirds. We have a particular song sparrow that flutes his many themes and variations right around dawn, to be joined at full light by the staccato of cardinals and the house sparrow's untrained violins. Once the fruit sets in July, robins, catbirds, and whole colonies of squirrels feast and wangle there for weeks, sometimes breaking into violent fights that send bloody fir or feathers cascading to the doorstep. There's a morbidity to the abundance: that rosy harvest outside our door is incidental to us, but a matter of primal urgency to the animals. Their wars in the branches are panting, darting, guerrilla affairs that can turn mortal.
This April, I noticed a robin's nest tucked against the wall in the cherry's shade, half-hidden in a green tangle of hydrangea. A lone hatchling stared at me as I looked, its head cocked so that one gray-black eye was fastened on me, glistening with fear. One of its parents chirped a warning from among the cherry branches.
I checked in on the hatchling most mornings after that, watching the tireless parents glide in and out through the greenery with endless morsels of food, watching the hatchling fatten and change color. It seemed miraculous that any animal, however small, should be having its whole upbringing in the shade of something I'd planted myself, a mere sapling, only a few years before.
Then on airless night in June I woke up as if I'd been nudged on the shoulder. Not the faintest breeze moved the cherry leaves outside the open window. But I found myself lying very still, neck craned, listening to some half-understood instinct. Suddenly there was a thrash and scuffle below, and a high-pitched, desperate, fluting wail, followed a second later by the mournful chittering of an adult Robin that dribbled gradually away to nothing.
In the morning, I found the nest dragged down from below and the hatchling dead in the driveway. A prowling cat had found it, had its sport, and moved on. It hadn't been eaten—merely bitten to death and dumped.
This is perhaps the moment for the typical observations about the amorality of nature, the tired adage that we can't assign human moral frameworks to cats or squirrels or robins, that nature must run its course and we are only fellow passengers, not prophets or referees. All that is true. But I can't help ascribing a kind of scope, even an outline of tragedy, to the squalid little Robin in the driveway with its shocked face and akimbo legs, and the parents forever vanished from the trees.
The weather is hotter now. These days we keep the windows shut.
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