24 Apr HOW WE SAY IT

I’ve been going to Teller Lake most evenings with my husband to walk and look at ducks.

Walking is my way of saying,
Lord I’m tired and my brain is too full.

The apricot and lavender clouds over the black silhouette of the mountains is God’s way of saying: Check me out. I don’t only make viruses, you know.

I walk along, watching the sky change. My heart lifts, which is its way of telling the rest of me: The best things in this world are not authored by humans. Then my body relaxes, which is its way of saying: That’s a relief.

Me joining my husband at the lake where he’s been watching ducks while I walked is me saying: Thank you for moving from Vermont to Colorado to be with me.

(He spent years in the New England wetlands, working as an ecologist, watching birds and bears. He lived in Burlington, Vermont, and loved it there. I moved there to be with him 20 years ago and it turned out I did not love it. After a year I said, I can’t live here, I’m going back to Colorado, and he came with me.)

But during this lockdown I have come to love the ducks — the little orange cinnamon teals, the black coots gliding solemnly past the bright cattails on the far shore, the wacky buffleheads, their white heads flashing hugely in the last rays of the sun, and the wood ducks, so extraordinary with their red, green, white and black.

I tell my husband: Wood ducks are like God decided at the last minute to take a bunch of pheasants and make them into ducks. My husband says, no, they’re like Mandarin aristocrats who got turned into ducks. His was better. I say: you should write a book. Which is my way of saying: let’s go on an extended writing retreat.

On Sunday, our friends Peter and Kim came up from Denver to join our expedition, which was them saying: You nearly always come visit us, it’s our turn.

The fact that my husband texted them and invited them to come up was his way of saying, I claim you as my friends, too; you’re not only Lisa’s.

The fact that they brought binoculars and readiness to bird was them saying to my husband: you’re the best naturalist in this group.

This was sort of a big deal because we’ve done several outdoorsy trips with these guys, and Peter from Denver is a big outdoorsman — kind of known for it, actually. He and I were a couple back in our youth. But now that we’re getting on in years, Peter the known outdoorsman is taking directions from my husband, about ducks. Kim never takes her binoculars away from her eyes, and she finds a coyote on the dam, and a yellow headed blackbird in the cattails.

The men are talking about ducks and looking at their birding apps. I feel moved by this, which I express by interrupting them repeatedly. But they don’t listen to me, because they are, in fact, engrossed.
And then Peter from Denver points at the sky at some large birds flying overhead and says: Wow! Look at that!

Probably cormorants, says my husband, the expert.

Peter from Denver says, wait, nope, they’re ibises! They have the curved bills — They’re ibises! He was genuinely excited, and when he said they’re ibises, he was also saying: I have a second home in Mexico.

That’s me teasing him. He wasn’t saying that at all. He does have a second home in Mexico, but what he was actually saying was, I love birds! I love this day!

We’re all mellower than we used to be. We’ve been alive a long time, and we’ve been friends a long time too.

Then we walked, six feet apart, through the wide open fields, so green under the blue Colorado sky, even though they’d been dumped with nearly a foot of snow five days before. We and talked about our camping trip near Crested Butte a few years back, our canoe trip down the Colorado River where we stayed multiple nights in the perfect campground, playing bocci ball in the cottonwood shade. We recalled the eclipse we watched together at the Laramie River in Wyoming, tears running down our cheeks when, for those thrilling few seconds, it went totally dark.

Reminiscing about those trips was us saying to each other, I love you, I love you, I love you.