of eastern Pennsylvania as much as her parents did. It was not a breathtaking landscape really. There was none of the salt- and taffy-tinged hominess of the Jersey shore, none of the sheltered feeling she always had in the valleys of Vermont and northern Massachusetts, certainly none of the expansiveness of the coasts of New England or Long Island.
The valleys that encircled the little hamlet of Burnham did not feel sheltering to Scarlet. No doubt there were psychological reasons for this. But maybe too it was the presence of the Delaware—a wide brown river with its own complex history, dividing one world from another somehow, obviously not a true barrier between East and West, not since colonial times at least—though at times it felt like one. And the river itself seemed strangely hemmed in, domesticated—skirted along its course through the northern end of Bucks County by the Delaware Canal. There was a kind of claustrophobia connected with that too; it was as if, following the course of a creek from the Burnham hills down to its end at the treacherous curves of the river road and then the footpath between river and canal, you found, instead of the freedom and openness you were hoping for, a kind of stage set.
Yet the whole area was beautiful, in a quiet way. There were remarkable stone farmhouses, peaceful farms nestled in the arms of valleys, curving roads that offered occasional glimpses of the river—brief, fleeting, breathtaking views. And then just as suddenly those roads would drop back down into a dark valley that was cloaked in shadow, no matter how brightly the sun was shining. No truly open vistas. And yet no shelter either.
When Scarlet returned to Burnham as an adult, she always felt a lump in her throat, a longing for the connection she’d felt as a child with the trees and the hills, the rushing creeks and the paths winding all around the woods between her house and the campus on one side, the river on the other. And also a powerful dissatisfaction that she’d never been able to write about this little corner of southeastern Pennsylvania. She was at home there, but also trapped. And she wondered: Did other people feel this way about their childhood homes?
Of course it was Addie who taught her to see it all this way. From the earliest days of her life Scarlet accompanied her mother on her excursions to the Nisky Creek blind. By the time Scarlet was four or five, Tom had built a second one, this time high in an old maple. For Scarlet this was a thrilling tree house, and she would spend the morning happily drawing and reading books while her mother drew. By then, with funds from the sale of the book and a few of her paintings, Addie had acquired a sophisticated scope, one that curved up and out of a small window in the blind, allowing her to train it on a distant bird and, at the same time, draw it comfortably.
Tom had cut a separate, larger window above a little bench at the back of the blind for Scarlet, and sometimes Addie would abandon her scope and come watch with her. Their favorite birds in those days were the black-capped chickadees, playful little performers who pecked at the dollops of peanut butter Addie and Scarlet left along the edge of Scarlet’s window when they arrived at the blind each morning. The chickadees would eat and frolic right in front of their noses, staring back at them, as curious as they were. So fearless and trusting.
“You have to admire them for that, don’t you think? Why in the world would they trust a human being?” Addie asked one day, and Scarlet never forgot that. She still sometimes dreamed about chickadees. The night before Addie died there was a beachball-sized one in Scarlet’s dream, hovering above her head and peering down at her; it seemed to be checking in, saying, “Are you doing okay?” And so she said, “I’m fine, now that you’re here,” and then she woke up.
Eventually the chickadees would finish their peanut butter and move on, and Addie would go back to drawing at her own window. Scarlet would entertain herself quietly for as long as she could. Then, when she could wait no longer, she would tap Addie on the shoulder and ask for lunch. They would spread their blanket—sometimes below, at the edge of the creek, or, on rainy days, on the floor of the blind itself—and start on their sandwiches. And Addie would tell her stories.
Sometimes, earlier on, they were stories about Addie herself—about her childhood on the farm, chasing their few cows through the pasture with her brother, John; about Scarlet’s grandparents, whom she saw only on holidays and for a week or so each summer; about Addie’s trip to England at the age of twenty. As Scarlet grew older and hungered for more of these kinds of personal reminiscences (Did you have friends? What were they like? Were there boyfriends? Did you go to parties? Tell me more about Cora and Lou), it seemed that Addie grew more and more bored with accounts of her own life.
What she wanted to tell Scarlet, instead, were stories about birds. About the land and its history. About famous figures in her world—Audubon, Peterson, Rosalie Edge and others connected with the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary to the west of them—people who were heroes to her. But Scarlet was disappointed when Addie’s stories took this turn; eventually she began declining her mother’s invitations to join her at the blind, opting instead to play with neighborhood friends, or stay at home reading on her own.
At the time, it felt to Scarlet as if Addie was constantly trying to teach her something; she got enough of that at school, she thought. Years later she could see that Addie was, in fact, trying to give a kind of shape to her own life in telling her daughter those stories—to place herself in the landscape, in the footsteps of these people she admired. And many of the stories were ones that Tom had told Addie first, when they’d met and fallen in love, there in that beautiful corner of upper Bucks County, in the woods above and below Burnham Ridge, during a spring spent observing birds, and, when they finally lowered their field glasses, one another.
six
MAY 2002
THIS MORNING’S SCENE IS a familiar one: Cora at the small table on the screened porch in back, glasses perched on her nose and paper spread in front of her, distractedly petting Lucy, her old collie, who’s flopped down at her feet. For as long as Scarlet can remember, Cora has been gray, her hair cut sensibly short. She’s also always been pretty. The sweetness and openness in her face and in her wide blue eyes have always somehow invited Scarlet to bare her soul, to share her deepest hurts and most ridiculous longings with Cora—though Cora will never, under any circumstances, do the same. If Cora has ridiculous longings, Scarlet hasn’t heard about them; she knows for certain about the depth of Cora’s particular pain—but she never hears about this from Cora either.
The two women are bundled in sweaters because it’s cool on the porch in the early morning. Sunlight streams in, the early fog burned off by now, and the long, grassy slope down to the beach is wet with dew. A rope clangs against a flagpole several houses down. Tom has been at his scope for an hour or more; Scarlet has been watching him. She knows he’d rather be elsewhere—in the marsh near the lighthouse, for instance—but everyplace screams with Addie’s presence now, and there is so much to be decided today. But for now no one can bear to begin that process, and Scarlet sits with Cora, as if it were a year or two ago and she’d just arrived, sleepless and distraught over her love life, whimpering over the mess she’d made of everything. Worlds away from everything she is feeling today.
At the sound of her oven timer, Cora disappears into the kitchen. Minutes later she returns with a tray and sits down across from Scarlet. “Coffee?” she asks, as always. When Scarlet declines, she cocks a surprised eyebrow, then pours juice into a smoothly glazed mug—one of her own—and waits for Scarlet to speak first.
“Lucy’s looking tired,” Scarlet finally says. She longs for a sip of Cora’s marvelously strong coffee but tries to act like she hasn’t noticed its intoxicating smell.
“She’s an old girl, like me,” Cora says as she pats the dog again. “Like all of us, your mother and Lou and I were saying, just a few nights ago. We had the strangest conversation, about all
