Shelter by Laura J. Oliver

Editor’s note: Join us for Spy Night with Laura Oliver, who will be reading her work in the Stoltz Listening Room at the historic Avalon Theater in Easton this Wednesday evening, June 4. Doors open at 5:30 pm.

I’m in a standoff with a house finch looking for affordable housing. The blossoms from three hanging baskets on the porch drape in pink and purple profusion but yesterday the impatiens began bobbing around as if someone short was lost in a cornfield. Suddenly, a finch popped out and flew to a powerline. A second later, she was back with a beak full of grass. She landed on the plant hanger, studied me a minute, then darted into the flowers as if down a submarine hatch.

Nooo, I implored her through the living room window. Do NOT build there! (These things seldom end well.)

When she emerged and flew off again, I went outside and climbed up on the porch railing to see into the basket. I plucked out a little stash of grass and tried to wave her off as she returned to watch me from the lilac. She’d brought her husband with her. Actually, they’re not married. They’re just living together until the kids are grown, and like many males in the animal kingdom, he was the flashier dresser.

I took the basket down and put it under a porch chair. Surely, they’d give up and find better real estate. But as soon as I rehung the impatiens, I saw telltale movement beneath the pink blossoms—like cats under a blanket. I climbed up on the railing a few hours later, and the birds erupted from the basket. Peering in, I saw they had already crafted a beautiful nest—it was perfectly round—an astonishing geometry, like the precise roundness of a carpenter bee hole—like the roundness of the moon—of all the planets and stars we have ever discovered. And now I don’t have the heart to dismantle it. It looks like the homesteaders are home.

I became a first-time homeowner by naivety. Mr. Oliver, a Navy Lieutenant, was stationed on the USS Pharris out of Norfolk. There was no way we were going to live in Virginia for more than a year or two, but we didn’t want to live in a concrete box of an apartment. We’d rent a house! But when we walked into the rental office, the agent on duty, who was only on duty because she had no clients, looked up and saw Mr. and Mrs. Dopey Stupid standing there. “Rent?” she asked, “I have a swell idea! Why don’t you buy?”

We looked at each other. “Use our one-time VA loan credit to buy a house we’ll only own for a year? Okay!! Thanks, Pam!”

A few weeks later, the ship deployed to the Med, and we owned a two-bedroom, one-story house in which I would live alone for a year. At the end of that deployment, we would offload the house for exactly what we had paid for it after replacing the entire heating system.

Our next house was back in Maryland — an effort to amass equity this time. A brown stucco with mustard yellow trim and an infestation of elder beetles— it was love at first sight—which is never about looks but always about chemistry.

(You can come back to this later.)

It had a corner fireplace, the huge wavy-glass windows of an early Victorian, a stained-glass foyer window, and an attic in which we found a steamship ticket to the Emma Giles.

As much as we loved that house, with one baby in tow and another on the way, three years later, we went house shopping for a bigger one. Mr. Oliver’s mother, a real estate agent who had never sold a house, saw us coming. “Hey,” she said, “There’s a three-acre lot in our neighborhood for sale, and the adjoining property owner is moving. Cool idea! He’s built an airplane hangar for his Cessna 152 his buyers don’t want. Why don’t you buy the lot and have his airplane hangar moved onto it? You can turn it into a house!” She was making this suggestion to someone whose parents had made a house from a barn. She knew her audience.

“What a swell idea!” exclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Dopey Stupid. “Let’s buy an airplane hangar!”

Which is what the house finch’s home seems to be. An airplane hangar. There have been touch-and-go landings, wave-offs, and flybys. They buzz the tower, and at least one crow has landed like a B52 bomber. I ran him off. I’m on neighborhood watch now.

Mother to any, mother to all. Parent to any, parent to all– if the world would just allow it. I’m protecting some brazen birds when I want to adopt teenagers who got passed over until adorable aged out to adolescence or take in fostered siblings so they will not be separated or orphaned children in Ukraine. I want to feed Gaza. Now. Yesterday. But I’m on bird duty. Like you, I hold that discrepancy, that disparity in stunned bafflement. What do I do with this inadequacy? This helplessness?

The longing to shelter must live in all of us. Which means the sadness of our inability to do so   does as well.

My mother once wrote, “The sky keeps teaching the ocean to be blue.” As if love is a tutorial and humans are the students who don’t advance. And it is all so vast that our efforts to help, to heal, feel insignificant. The ocean is not even blue. It’s only scattering light, and the sky becomes the blackness of space.

You want to do more, to give big, so give small. Offer whatever you can from wherever you are.

Give new meaning to shelter in place.

For tickets, go here.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.