Sounds About Right

She lay on her back in the snow, under a midnight sky, cut lace-like through the canopied northern conifers. Juniper, fir, cedar and hemlock, among an almost fairytale assembly of what she imagined to be shoulder-less, snow laden sentinels.

She raised her chin tilting her head back enough to upside-down glance the twinkling lights from the houses of her parents’ neighborhood. Returning her gaze to the sky, she envisioned herself from above as a silhouette planted in the luminescent ground.

What had drawn her outside into the patch of woods, a few hundred yards beyond her parents’ house, was the call of an owl.

At some point in the evening after dinner, when dishes were cleared and loaded into the machine, the churning and pulsing commencing the great American collective end-of-day sigh, she sat at the kitchen table and consumed the last drops of mulled wine which she was convinced her mother had served because it was terrible.

What to serve? That would have been a dilemma. It was the holidays and everybody drinks. Not providing alcohol, going it dry, was a statement that even to the spare few of them that the pandemic limit on gathering mandated (her mom, dad, herself and the girls) it would have been an untenable crack in the door of what was really going on.

It just wasn’t going to happen. Was there rage about that? Sure. Obviously.

So the game had become an attempt to present the most wholesome alcoholic options. Beverages so geared to the season of current celebration that it would be impossible to deny the goodness of intention.

How could you find fault in chocolate martinis garnished with mini candy canes? Warm spiked cider in mason jars with whole cinnamon stick stirrers? Sambuca with floating coffee beans aflame in short glasses? Eggnog with fresh grated nutmeg, mulled wine served in goblets?

What was really going on is that she drank too much and was still getting away with sneaking pills from time to time. Not like before but not nothing.

Midway into the dishwashing cycle, a brief staccato session of draining and jet spraying occur, a crescendo of sorts. She fingered the last wine slip from the bottom of her glass, the way the girls might go in full paw for the end of the peanut butter. She began to feel agitated and a little deeper steeped in resentment spiced wine. Her dull ears missing the first half dozen or so rounds of the call of an owl somewhere from the woods outside.

Hoo hoo hoo-hoo hoo.

Hoo hoo hoo-hoo hoo.

She’d avoided going outside almost entirely since early fall. Hadn’t even pulled out her snow boots or gear and hadn’t a clue where to begin to look for anything but now she was compelled to follow the sound to origin.

She went to the overstuffed coat closet and layered herself in whatever she could find. She didn’t bother searching for her boots but found her father’s old Sorrels by the front door and slid into them before trudging out into the cold. She took off towards the trees in about six or seven inches of snow.

Hoo hoo hoo-hoo hoo.

Hoo hoo hoo-hoo hoo.

Before long she found herself in front of a towering Douglas fir, the owl perched high in the upper branches.

She positioned herself and lay at the base of the tree looking up at the clear and silvering sky.

There was a book at the girls’ daycare about owls. They read it often and talked about it at home. The great grey owl, the barred owl and barn owl. The snowy owl and screech owl and the great horned.

This owl was gray and white with enormous satellite eyes. She watched as it looked up, pulsed it’s body and with an almost entirely silent whoosh, stretched out its wings and took off.

After a few moments, she pulled herself out of the snow and trudged back taking the path she had made on the way out.

Entering the house through the kitchen door, she found the lights were on and her parents waiting. Her mother, in her robe at the kitchen table, her father leaning against the counter.

“I heard an owl,” she offered by way of explanation. “I went for a walk, I followed the sound.”

She and her father hadn’t made eye contact yet. He was sort of examining the air between them. Finally he asked, “What kind of owl?”

“What kind of owl?” she repeated, wondering when she was supposed to have become an expert on owls. She thought of the book from daycare.

“I don’t know Dad, a barn owl?”

“Barn owls don’t hoot,’ he replied in earnest. “You sure you seen a barn owl? If ya seen a barn owl you’d a heard a screeching not a hoot and it’s not a pleasing sound.”

She was suddenly awash in shame. Heart rate accelerating, blood rushed to her cheeks and filled the lobes and tops of her ears. She felt exposed as if somehow he was omnisciently aware of all her life’s transgressions. She felt woozy and had to steady herself.

She looked at her parents, noticing now for the first time the snow boots perched on her mother’s lap, The pair she hadn’t bothered to looked for earlier.

They were just worried, she realized. They’d just been worried.

“Maybe it was a grey?” She offered, tears inexplicably coming to her eyes. “A great Grey?”

Her dad had a way of disarming instantaneously with absolutely no effort. “Sounds about right,” he replied. "Sounds about right."

She took a breath, walked over to the paper towel dispenser, tore off a sheet and wiped her face. She was at once spent and new. There’s no way she could have known in that moment that her new self was already an occupant of her old self. That a new wiser and more level headed pilot was already on board, had taken command, was directing traffic and that from here she would slowly, resistantly, grow into the land of her body and the land she inhabited.

But she didn’t know any of that yet.