“The children are doing well,” Priscilla tells me, when she has no choice but to sit and can finally talk. “They send their love. They’ve grown.”

        She and her husband Carl have been busy refurbishing the mudded nest atop my back porch light. Priscilla’s mother did it before her and her mother’s mother, too. They were all named Priscilla.    

 
      Priscilla and Carl are Barn Swallows. Barn Swallows don’t much care for change. Names and nests, they’re passed along, mother to daughter, father to son. 

      They fly south for the winter. Priscilla and Carl have a nest on the porch of another little farmhouse in Chile, near a small town named Talca. There are two children there on the farm, Luis and Anna. 

        Carl is too busy collecting bugs to talk, but Priscilla has laid the first of her eggs and must sit, so she tells me now the news from Luis and Anna. Of their birthdays and loose teeth, the llamas they raise, and of their great-grandfather, Oscar, who sits on the porch near their nest and tells story after wondrous story.

       Priscilla will tell me too, eventually, of their journey. Of the miles and storms and passersby. We have two weeks to talk, a little more, before the eggs hatch and she must gather food as well. Two weeks to fill her, like a postcard, with stories and love to return to Luis and Anna and Oscar, who sit in the warmth of a porch far, far south, waiting.  


        

'Can I be Peter Pan, too,' Pete asked, one night after I had finished reading to him from that boy's adventures. 
'I don't see why not,' I said. 'You nearly are already.' 
'Do I need to be sprinkled with something?' he asked. 
'No,' I said. 'Only if you want to fly away and leave me lonely forever.' 
'You'll be lonely?' 
'Incredibly so,' I told him. 
Pete tilted his head to the left and then tilted his head to the right, a thing that he does when he's thinking on a matter intently. 
'Just the name then,' he said, finally. 'And a jacket, perhaps, that's green.' 

That sounds like a plan, Peter Pan, Peter Pan. That sounds like a plan to me.

If I was rain I'd fall gently. 
Birds like me better that way. 
I'd leave plenty of room for sunshine, 
because even I prefer blue to gray. 
If I was rain I'd remember
every nest in every hole and tree, 
and fall to the left just a little, 
because there's a little mother and father in me.

If I was rain I'd fall gently.
Gentle is a good thing to be.   

Sproutings and bloomings, courtings and hatchings, burrowings and nestings, clippings and thinnings, and always the rising of the great green tide. 

Busy is this place called Spring.    

   

My house has memory, and in its day dreamings speaks the soft scents of buttered pancakes and maple syrup, of hickory fires and bread, fresh from the oven.

There was only the moon. A perfect crescent. Tilted upwards. And above it, a single star. Blazing. 

‘Wow,’ the boy said, and the three dogs looked to the sky.

‘It’s my birthday star,’ Pete said, when it was clear that everyone was amazed. 

The big dogs looked at Pete, and then to the boy, who was looking at Pete as well. 

Pete only continued to look upwards. At the star. His birthday star. 

‘Snacks and presents,’ he finally said, and turned and marched back to the house.                



                                                                             

On warm nights when the moon is full, the big dogs stay outside. And when they bark at the things that howl and screech, little Pete and I raise our heads to listen, then move closer to each other and wonder until we fall back to sleep.