The Face at the Window

The day before yesterday, I was typing at the computer.

It's a pretty common event. I was trying to cram into one long day my final edits of an overdue essay--one that I am very much looking forward to seeing in print, and one whose final revisions were causing more than usual stress.

I decided that the entire day would be devoted to completing this project, and that everything else would have to wait. I began serious changes at about 9:30 in the morning, and by mid-afternoon, I was definitely making progress . . . and definitely a long way from done.

Next to my computer screen is a second-storey Window. Not a Microsoft Window, but a real window.

A screen that I can look through and see a real world, instead of a virtual one. Sometimes, a real world with animals. Through this window, I have at times, seen deer. And turkeys. And a fox. And cats. And assorted bugs and birds.

Toward mid-afternoon, from the corner of my eye, I caught a motion at the window. I looked up, refocused, stared into the leaves of the woods beyond, seeking out the movement that had caught my eye.

For a second there was nothing. And then, in the corner of the window, much closer than I anticipated--right up against the glass, in fact--a motion again; a small face peering in my second-storey window, then ducking down again.

I am at an age where such changes in focal distance leave a doubt in the mind. But I had an expectation. In the past, small perching birds--goldfinch and nuthatch--have clung to that window ledge briefly, scrabbling for a foothold, tempting my cats, before giving up and flying away.

I looked again where the face had been, thinking "but he is too small, his feet made no noise." And then he was back.

More than a year ago, stuck while writing another essay, I had gone out into the garden. There I met a fellow creature, and over the next few days, we met with regularity and his presence helped me through that bit of the essay:

" The honeysuckle arches over the stone path that leads through the garden. The serpent coils there, among the leaves and blossoms, the patterns of his scales blending with the shade and dappled light of the late afternoon sun. In “The Name of a Dog,” Levinas insisted on the specificity of his dog: “But enough of allegories! . . . The dog is a dog. Literally a dog!” (48). Certainly, Derrida is responding to Levinas when he insists on asserting a complementary specificity: “I must immediately make it clear, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat” (6). So, too, must I now insist on the specificity of my serpent: the snake is a snake; literally a snake. And not a little snake, either, for as he dozed on the honeysuckle, I measured him with a tape measure at just over three feet. Writing this essay, in late spring, as I took a break to do some gardening, I stumbled upon him one afternoon. He was sunning himself on the very branch for which I was reaching with clippers in hand. As the essay dragged on over the next week, we began meeting regularly every sunny afternoon, a little after three. The fox who stepped lightly out of the woods one afternoon, and climbed the steps leading up from the overgrown lane, only to work his way along the edge of the side yard, before disappearing into bushes that lead to the open field beyond was only a visitor. As was the deer who nibbled the tender new leaves at the very edge of the wood. These came and went. But the snake in the garden remains. And with each of his near-daily visits, something like a face more clearly emerged. One afternoon, his eye was clouded, milky, a sign that he was about to shed his skin. The next day, bright-eyed and seeking warmth, he was back on his familiar perch."

The face at my window came clearly into focus. By the time I got my camera, he was leaving again.






I went downstairs and photographed his departure.



He is the one who is NOT the cable that snakes through my outer wall into my computer.



He travelled up, transverse, across the bricks, in dappled light, then down beneath the dry already-fallen leaves into the gutter trough along the garage's roofline. He is not his father (or grandfather's--Faulkner would say "grandfather") size, but it seems likely that he lives in his father's house.



When the weather turns cold, and the ground gets hard, the field mice will come looking for warmth. And he will be waiting. In the Keweenaw this summer, people spoke of how dry it was last winter, and how warm the water was this summer; that pattern promises heavy snow in the north this year, they tell me.



Does my tenant have a face?