My Wife Never Saw an Owl
My wife never saw an owl. She would mention this at odd times, fairly regularly. Not just when she was looking at trees in the woods or trees on the street or trees through the car window. And not just when she was refurbishing birdhouses or rehydrating hummingbird feeders or referencing a book of North American birds. She would mention it when putting on her blue snow boots or scrambling eggs, when waiting in line to send a package to our son or get handed a bag of popcorn without butter.
It had become such a longing in her life that for Christmas I gave her a soft, overpriced saw-whet owl to hang on the tree. It could have been seen as a sad substitute — Christmas is always a touchy time — but she liked it fine, and hung it around eye level, somewhere above the yellow submarine and below the tin angel.
On Dec. 26, driving home from a dinner with friends, turning into the driveway, just before midnight, I heard my wife whisper excitedly, “Look. An owl. Shhhhh. Don’t move.” Sitting on the grass in front of our house was a saw-whet owl. He was looking in our direction, alertly, as if he had been waiting for us to come home, like a family pet. My wife turned off the car radio to see better. The owl swiveled his head to the left to look at something as we looked at him. “It’s so small. Can he see us? They’re nocturnal, right? Turn off the lights. Is it a baby or just a little owl? Oooh. It’s so adorable. An owl. An owl.” (Yes, she can whisper in italics.)
The owl was six or seven inches high, white and brown downy, with a black bill and big black eyes ringed with deep yellow sclerae, and he was very still, except for that single sudden swivel of his head. “What is he doing on the ground?” my wife whispered. “Is he hurt? Awww. Turn the lights back on. Maybe he needs help. Or maybe he’s eating something. Do you see anything? Don’t move. Shhhh.”
We sat there, mesmerized by the saw-whet in front of our house until a truck rumbled by and spooked the little owl. After a labored, wobbly liftoff, he was soon flying across the road and through the boughs and into the night. There was just a sliver of moon. It illuminated nothing.
In the house, my wife went directly to her guide book and read aloud other names by which the northern saw-whet owl is called: Acadian owl, sparrow owl, farmland owl, Queen Charlotte owl, and little nightbird. And then she sat there, in a shaft of wonder, looking at something I could not see. She will never say she never saw an owl again.
For Christmases of the future, I am going to shop for her with even greater care, not to say tremulousness, for there are powers at work here, and I don’t understand them. And I have less than a year.
Bruce Buschel is a writer, producer, director, and restaurateur. He lives in Bridgehampton.