I don't know the birds here. Small, brown bundles - not swallows, not sparrows. Their calls are all bubbles and springtime. Soon it will be morning in Canada. A girl, seven years old, will lie in her single wooden-framed bed and she'll hear the chickadees calling silk sounds into the cold snap air. Everything in the world will be tight with the freeze except for that sound, which is full and rich and sorrowful. She thinks she could hold that song in her cupped hands, let it swirl inside the flesh walls like a warm storm.
At the coffeeshop this morning, the closest thing to a greasy spoon our town has, the acrid smell of cigarettes mixed with the humid drift of coffee and the slick danger of hot oil under egg yolk. If I closed my eyes and went by smell alone, I could have been in my grandmother's kitchen. She would be there across the table, staring out over her cup and into the blurred canvas of shadows where my face should be.