Loved Enough

For my mum.

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Note to readers who will be more distracted by the idea of a sandpiper flying a very long way than by the fact that they talk to owls (I’m not judging my brain does those things too):

I got you. You can focus on the story, I have properly researched the migratory pathways of all the species mentioned. They really do fly all that way, alone.

But it’s not really a story about birds anyway.

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Sandra the solitary sandpiper stood at the edge of the deep Amazon River. Her chicks tottered on the beach. The sand half swallowed her scaly toes, and the sun soaked into the feathers on her back. In this foreign place, the breeze whispered in a language she understood.

Often, her mind wandered back to her homeland and the first time her mother spoke of faraway places:

‘You don’t have to stay by this muskeg bog forever, under this heavy Alaskan sky. Elsewhere, the water dances. It sparkles in the sunlight, scrambling over pebbles.’

‘Water moves, Ma?’ asked Sandra, eyes growing wide.

Until then, the stagnant bog had contained the universe.

Her mother nodded:

‘Sometimes it twirls and splashes in small, lively streams. Sometimes it swells, a dark mass heaving its way towards the ocean. If you fly a great distance to a place called the Amazon, you will find such a formidable river. When this bog hardens, frozen in silence, and sleep numbs all the animals around it, their hearts slowed nearly to a stop, all movement suspended, then the Amazon lives, warmed by a generous sun.’

Sandra stretched her wings. The pulse of adventure beat till their tips. She had never been to the Amazon River, but in her mind she saw a powerful surge of water. Her imagination feasted on the steady stream of descriptions she drew from her mother’s willing beak. River creatures teemed in her head.

One day, her mother attempted to depict a manatee, then broke off.

‘I see that words are no longer enough,’ she said instead, peering into her daughter’s eyes. ‘My travelling days are over, but yours are imminent. And inevitable.’

She was right, Sandra longed to see everything her mother had seen, and more.

‘We are called solitary sandpipers because that’s how we travel,’ her mother continued. ‘We soar above mountains and over oceans - alone, independent, insatiable. We follow our hearts, listening to their every murmur, correcting our course at their slightest nudge. I would gladly release my memories, let them imprint majestic lakes and infinite oceans in your mind. But memories cannot and must not be given. You must leave and make your own. You belong in grander places. When your eggshell cracked, the sky leaked already from your tiny eyes.’

* * *

Sandra did leave, soon after that, on her first adventure.

She had not flown far when she spotted water moving like her mother had described: a thin scintillating stream of liquid silver flowed through the spruce trees. She alighted on a pebble and watched, immobile, as the water bubbled and splashed around her.

A saw-whet owl perched in a nearby tree.

‘Hello,’ said Sandra. ‘Are you flying south too?’

He looked down his beak at her, over an inflated breast of perfectly groomed feathers.

‘I don’t follow the crowd,’ he replied. ‘I’m heading in the opposite direction.’

Sandra admired his strength of character. He would fly north as the winter lay in predatory stillness, ready to uncoil.

She entrusted a message to him: ‘If you see my mother, please tell her the water dances just as she said it would.’

The owl ushered her words northwards. A few days later, her mother’s whispered reply swept through the loftiest boughs of the trees, who bent in the wind and murmured to the reeds, who in turn confided in the salmon that darted between their stems. Wet scales shimmering, the fish jumped out of the stream, startling Sandra.

‘Your mother is proud of you,’ they proclaimed in chorus.

The stream sparkled and gurgled, and Sandra learned to hop from pebble to pebble without being swallowed by the current. Still, the impulse to see greater things, to soar higher, and to fly further throbbed in her heart. Her wings defied restraint.

And so she surrendered. She flew over leafy valleys and crystalline mountain tops, through smog above cities and sand clouds over desert. Spruce forests yielded the land to mangroves, and heavy northern clouds gave way to clear blue skies. Whenever disorientation threatened, she gathered her attention, and dedicated it entirely to the whispers of her heart.

Then one day she saw it: luscious, extravagant, limitless - the Amazon Basin, a mighty snake winding through an immense plain.

Soon, warm sand softened her landing. She murmured to the gentle breeze that caressed her feathers:

‘I’m here, Ma. It’s as alive as you said it would be, and my feathers are warm. My journey ends here, in the land where I belong. I will stay and raise my chicks in the sunshine. But I will miss you, Ma.’

Her mother stood with peat clinging, moist, to her feet. She heard the murmur from afar. She lifted her eyes to the clouds that floated south, to reply.

The clouds travelled over mountains and valleys. The thirsty desert pleaded with them but they passed, heedless, and carried their message to the great river. There, they condensed it into a single raindrop. It fell from the sky as a caiman’s nose broke the surface of the river, and it landed on the space between his nostrils. He heaved his body onto the sand and lay at Sandra’s feet, his tail still submerged.

‘Your mother will miss you too,’ he said to her. ‘But she takes comfort in the fact that you have escaped the humdrum bog.’

***

A year passed and brought Sandra to where this story began and whence it now continues: a contented moment in the sunshine, watching her tottering babies.

‘Mummy, Mummy! I have sand in my feathers!’ cried a chick.

Sandra fussed over the little bird, then paused. A shadow spread at their feet. She looked towards the river. The golden sand dimmed to a dull yellow, and the deep water darkened, ominous. She raised her eyes to the sky, where a dark, purple-grey cloud stalled above their heads.

‘We must find shelter,’ she cried to her children.

But as she turned to run, someone landed in the sand in front of her. It was Annabelle, a solitary sandpiper, a friend from Alaska - a friend whose tears had wet Sandra’s wings when she left, and on whose feathers Sandra’s own tears had fallen.

‘You found me!’ said Sandra, hopping from one leg to the other, flapping her wings yet going nowhere, forgetting the cloud above them.

‘Yes. It wasn’t hard. There was an owl - ‘

Sandra interrupted her:

‘What is it?’

Annabelle did not hop and did not flap her wings. Instead, she stood solemnly on the sand opposite her friend.

‘It’s your mother,’ replied Annabelle as the first drops of rain struck their faces. ‘Her wing is broken. She’s quite helpless.’

The news curled its icy fingers around Sandra’s heart.

‘Then I must go to her at once,’ she said through the pelting water.

But a sound distracted her then, and she looked around, remembering.

Her chicks bobbed and chirped in the tropical rain. Their tiny feet could dance in the storm, but their wings would not yet carry them through the sky.

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