The Backpack Press

There’s a mourning dove near my window in the Bronx. She’s new. I hear her in the morning now, and at twilight sometimes.

I grew up listening to the soft grey birds near my parents’ house in Michigan. Over breakfast. The cooing, the pattern of cooing, that plaintive, slow soft grey cooing. The other birds set off on a frantic chatter, but the doves, they were the calmer voice of reason. A sultry mezzo countering the soprano chorus of ingenues.

There was another dove on the windowsill at work today in Queens. She let me watch her until my shadow forced her away. I’ve never seen one up so close before.

I tell you this and I know you’ll think, oh, listening to that sad sound from the visitors by her window now must remind her of home and lazy Michigan summers.

It’s not that at all. It’s that now I know: home must have been reminded of me.