THE BIRD FARM

Somebody said to me yesterday you should be more careful and I was already being more careful so I said oh go jump in a lake which I don’t think I’d ever said before and it made me laugh, just a soft peal like a xylophone and then almost out of nowhere I thought of Maggie after all these years and the bird farm we had.

But back back back.

My father was an economics professor at the University of Toronto, my mother a cellist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, my brother an astronaut, my sister a novelist, and I, the accidental youngest, a deadly competitive tomboy with killer marksmanship and a mighty roar.

I had no friends you see the boys were afraid I think because I wasn’t, and the girls, well, I hung around with the ones in my neighbourhood we’d ride bikes, go off to the playground in the summer under the trees cross-legged laughing, skipping rope, exploring the trickle of stream that rose briefly in the spring, typical childhood fare but there were limits and boundaries, girlhood rules I was not privy to, and there can be no compliance without understanding so I overstepped and became clumsy, less careful to mind my manners and let only the nice girl out leave the arm-wrestling sweaty monster to starve, wander off or teeter on some diminishing ledge.

But instead Maggie.

With her don’t-give-a-fuckness, dukes up, she rode horses western-style and held her boy-jeans up with rope. Her father – did you think I was going to say her Pa? – her father was a printer at the Daily Miner and News before he took up farming for real, and her mother was a seamstress at Judy’s and secretly made Maggie the most beautiful bandanas I had ever seen which she tied around her neck like the ones my father wore to work but in solid, unnameable colours.

Okay now about our bird farm.

The farms at our outskirts were vying for the privilege of growing for the Quaker Oats company located in Schriber, an hour away, and Maggie’s farm (I know I know) grew the best grain, the yield surpassing even the Rapp family farm which had more than three times the acerage and John Deere machinery, while Maggie and me used the horses, she taught me to ride that first summer I met her.

Our secret was the soil we drenched with worm castings.

Maggie started the worm farm unknowingly when she was a child the worms she collected and put into the plastic ice cream container forgotten over the winter but for the miserable hours she woke up sometimes remembering them, mourning them. In the spring when she opened the lid, the dirt was different, as if it has been knitted, and the worms were worming. She’d been pea-shooting just then and plunked a pea in there and it was like Jack’s beanstalk. Her father said hmmmmmm and soon after, the barn, the small red one, was full of worms in troughs and that summer the field appeared swollen, cars slowed as they passed, suspicious.

We ran the farm for years but when Maggie got sick Quaker Oats was long gone anyway and we just let the fields go. By the time she got better – and she was fully better for the longest time – the buildings all of them were in need of repair so we fixed the big barn first for the horses and then we got to work on the house which took all summer the roof skeleton for two weeks, a new floor, windows, plaster, without planning to we rebuilt the entire place except the kitchen where Maggie’s mother had kept her sewing machine, no repairs were necessary, Maggie said because her mother’s clever ghost, so we just gave it a coat of paint I can't for the life of me remember now the colour.

When it came time to do the old red barn the following summer we went inside and it sounded like when I used to put my ear to the ground listening to the underground stream near the playground when I was a kid but Maggie knew right away it was the worms, and instead of repairing the old barn we removed the roof like a lid and that’s when our place up there all those years ago became the bird farm.

They came all the birds in the world it seemed with their soft swooping scales me and Maggie sitting there on our new porch like we were born again.