Light, Birds, Lake 

a supplement to “’RSVP’ Is a Collective Noun for Snowy Egrets”

We are in a Florida park walking toward the lake’s edge. Or I am the one walking. Pushing, really. And Mom is sitting in her wheelchair. Above us, snowy egrets glissade into nests hidden high in the old trees. Some of the hefty birds land to rest; some loft to the sky, white wings ruffling, blinks of shadow. 

This morning, Mom and I search for a suitable site for my unplanned nuptials, and we sweat in the hard sunlight as we go. She won’t be here much longer. She lifts her mask and sucks from the oxygen tank I’ve propped onto her lap. In front of us, the putrid lake licks at cattails, and Mom chatters, misses otters playing in the shallows, the slippery creatures ducking in the muck. We wheel through the azalea garden, its pinks and oranges full-blown, and she shifts, turns in her seat, points to spots appropriate for a ceremony. She’s so cheery, so excited I’m finally engaged.  

I imagine you walking down that path in an ivory gown. Not white. You can’t wear white, but you should wear sensible shoes. Mom’s words always feel veiled in something. I don’t respond, let the park’s sublimity envelop us. The wind picks up like it does before a storm, and the stench of a dead animal drafts onto the scene. I look up and spot a lifeless egret perched in a shading oak; its feathers still swish in the breeze, head drooping, swaying on a broken neck, the open beak clacking on the tree’s trunk. Like everything else in the tropics, there’s a perfumed blend—the sharp scent of blossoms barely mask the stink of a putrefying corpse. On the same branches as the egret’s carcass, the flock roosts and fiddles with their feathers, fussing at one another, squawking, trilling. 

The light, the birds, the lake. Redolence and loss. Mom pulls off her oxygen mask, gossips about her bridge club. And I guide her air back toward her face, gentle with her brittle fingers. They’re snappable as wishbones. 

Look at this! she exclaims when we pass under a cypress festooned in hair-like Spanish moss. Is that an anhinga? She gestures as we reach the dock. I shake my head.

No, it’s a cormorant—look at the curved beak. We stop for a while to watch the water bird’s show. With its outstretched wings, it shimmies to air-dry, hopping from one leg to the other on the pilings. A slow jig. Thunder trembles through the forest behind us, and the worrying rain clouds creep in.  

Mom pretends not to notice the mounting storm, commends the sun’s slashes on her blanket-covered knees, Good ol’ sun.

Then the morning disappears completely into a thicket, and she gestures toward the climbing cumulus. That’s the kind of sky you’d see in an Old Masters’ painting, isn’t it? We continue along the water’s lip, heading toward the car, and I lean down, consider kissing my mother’s moist crown, but I don’t.