In March, I left my apartment in the city and returned to my childhood home eight states away. Mom had to sell the house in a rush, the deal closing just before the stay-at-home orders went into effect. I wanted to be there so that we could make the necessary repairs and say goodbye to the place together.
We had to be out by June 1, and the days leading up to that deadline were foggy and frazzled with work, rushed repairs, and packing. But they also gifted me the luxury of greater attention: to the garden’s reawakening, the northbound migrating birds, the ice melting from the creeks and the pond in the woods. These were things I had seen, smelled, and heard as a boy, but had neglected as a young man; things whose absence I knew I would mourn after we had gone.
I noticed the wrens in April. As I fetched logs from our woodshed one stubbornly chilly afternoon, a chestnut-colored puffball winged out through the shed’s latticed right side. Once back inside the house, I peered through the window toward the shed and watched. A minute or so later, that same little tuft, with a popsicle-stick tail and curved beak, reentered through the lattice, hopped across the uneven terrain of stacked logs, and darted into a corner of the overhang, out of view.
More time whiled away at the window confirmed that a mating pair of Carolina wrens had built a nest in that protected corner of the shed. Observing their travails became a daily ritual for Mom and me. Every morning, the male alit atop the weeping cherry tree beside the woodshed and sang to the sunrise before he embarked on his foraging. When we saw him return to the shed with a plump bug pinched in his beak, we cheered his triumph.
Initially, I treated the area around the woodshed as wren territory, sacrosanct. But my curiosity about the nest, about the eggs – and maybe chicks – it held got the better of me. One morning in early May, the garden blooming in white and pink, the woods greening like a Granny Smith, I tiptoed into the woodshed, hoisted myself up a stack of logs, and craned my neck to the suspected nest site.
I met the mother’s tiny eye. She burst from the woven dome of the nest, careened against my shoulder, and fled. I dropped down and sprinted back into the house, tormented by the possibility that she might abandon her brood because of my intrusion.
Several minutes later, as I watched anxiously, the pair flitted together through the lattice on the shed’s right side and ascended to the nest. I almost collapsed with relief.
Spring wore on toward June. As the dread of leaving home grew with the passage of the days, the wrens provided us with a pure, recreational joy. Their antics granted us a respite amid the frenzy of final preparations.
When the eggs hatched in mid-May, the new parents began their persecution of the chipmunks. The poor devils had to pass the woodshed on their way to the seed-strewn area beneath the birdfeeders on the opposite side of the yard, and the wrens would not let them cross unscathed. They hurled alarm calls and mobbed the trespassing chipmunks, delivering sickle-beaked zaps to their furry behinds.
Our greatest hope was that we would see the chicks fledge before we left. And on May 31, I sensed a buzz in the air as I took my habitual look out the window. The adult wrens were flying around the shed’s left side, dropping to its floor, and then rising back up to the log stacks. I squinted. There were four golf ball–sized chicks on the ground. Their scrawny wings twitched; their tails were stumps no longer than my thumbnail.
Mom and I were overjoyed and immediately much too invested in the new family’s fortunes. I wish we could have seen what came next. We wanted to watch the two fierce parents raise their young, to see the juveniles sprout their tails and strike off on their own. But the next day was June 1.
When I woke up that morning, there was no wren in his dawn perch beside the woodshed. He had other places to be. So did we.