generation ovenbird I’ve forgotten this. The way the air bites. The way my breath is actually a suspended ocean that condenses and catches in the fibers of my scarf. We’re alone but for the birds—nuthatches and eastern towhees, tufted titmice and song sparrows, cardinals and dark-eyed juncos. A hairy woodpecker lands on my hand, and for a moment we’re face to face, regarding each other. It seems to weigh less than the air, as if its bones are full of helium, and in alighting it invites my fingers towards the sky, drifting upward as the snow drifts down. There’s snow in my hair. There’s snow above the curious eye of the woodpecker taking off from the warmth of my palm. My mother spots the deer. Three at least, silent on legs like saplings, faces turned towards us. We look for owls, but the one I find turns out to be a broken off branch and not an owl at all. Binoculars make clear what my eyes could not. Bark and cambium, not feathers or the round dish of a funnelled face. Only months ago my father could barely walk one hundred metres from the parking lot. Today he walks for an hour. Slowly, but still, steady enough and managing to find his footing on an icy path. In the car I take my gloves off and my hands are pale in my lap. My age, perhaps, shows here the most, in the skin as thin as vellum and the profusion of accumulated melanin forming tiny rockpools in the hollows between ligaments. With my grandmother’s diamond perched on the ring finger of my right hand I could mistake my hands for hers. Every day I become closer to the past. One day I’ll be alone and I’ll look into the mirror and see her face, and when the bravest birds land in my hands I’ll hold us all, the feathered weightlessness of unravelling generations reflected in my failing eyes. 260224 what's it to you? who go blather from