There are owls living under my lemon bush, and that sentence still bothers me a little because owls are supposed to live in trees. At least that is where my personal arrangement of the animal kingdom has always kept them. Owls sit on branches, preferably at night, looking wise and making noises suggesting they know considerably more about the situation than you do.
Mine live in a hole in the ground.
They are burrowing owls, small Florida birds that do exactly what the name says. They live underground, and a pair of them decided that the ground beneath a lemon bush near our house on Marco Island looked like suitable owl property. Nobody consulted us about the transaction. One day there were no owls living under the lemon bush, and then there were.
The interesting thing was not simply that I suddenly had owls for neighbors. Seeing them brought back another owl I hadn’t thought about in years.
His name was Owlie.
Mother Invents an Owl
Owlie came into existence when I was a little boy because my mother told me stories about him. They were bedtime stories, although she also told them when I was sick and needed entertaining. I don’t know whether she had a fixed collection of Owlie stories or simply invented another one whenever circumstances required it. I was the audience, not the archivist.
There was something familiar about them, though.
Among the books I grew up with was Childcraft, a children’s encyclopedia and story collection that occupied a considerable amount of childhood shelf space in those days. It included versions of the old Appalachian Jack Tales—folk stories about a fellow named Jack who wandered through one improbable situation after another, usually surviving through some combination of luck, ingenuity and the willingness of a story to behave as stories do.
Mother’s Owlie stories bore a strange resemblance to those Jack Tales.
She may have grown up hearing similar stories herself, after all, before we had this internet crud, people actually read and talked. Perhaps she remembered pieces and rearranged them. Perhaps I am imposing a relationship on two childhood memories seventy-odd years after the fact. What I know is that Mother created Owlie for me, and in my memory the world he inhabited felt remarkably like the world of those Jack stories.
The peculiar part: I cannot remember a single Owlie story.
I don’t remember one adventure. I don’t know what Owlie wanted, what trouble he got into, who else inhabited his world, or how Mother got him safely to the end so I could go to sleep. The plots are gone, the dialogue is gone, and Mother’s exact words are gone.
But Owlie isn’t.
That strikes me as a very odd arrangement for memory. The stories created the character, yet the character survived after every story I can consciously retrieve had disappeared.
Owls Follow Me Around
Owls continued turning up in my life long after Mother’s bedtime stories stopped.
At some point I began collecting owl statuettes, although “began collecting” makes it sound more deliberate than I remember it being. I liked owls. I acquired some, people gave me others, and eventually there were enough of them that apparently I was a man who collected owls.
One pair became something more than decoration.
There was a period when I was a single parent raising my son. Mother gave me two ceramic owls, one large and one small telling me that they represented me and my son. I think they may have been made in Iron Mountain, Tennessee, where a lot of pottery of that type was made in those days.
What I do remember clearly is what the two owls became.
The large owl represented me, and the little one represented my son.
Nobody had to explain the symbolism. There we were, father and boy, converted into ceramic birds.
Humans do this sort of thing constantly, and we seldom stop to notice how peculiar it is. We assign personalities to animals, talk to dogs that understand only a fraction of the vocabulary, apologize to cats that have just injured us, and become attached to representations of creatures that aren’t even alive. A pair of ceramic owls can cease being household ornaments and somehow become a father and his son.
I doubt this is particularly unusual. You may have something in your own house that has undergone the same transformation. To everybody else it is a stuffed animal, a photograph, a figurine, a shell, or some ridiculous object that ought to have been thrown away thirty years ago. To you it is attached to a person, a time or a relationship, and throwing away the object would somehow feel uncomfortably close to throwing away part of what it carries.
I don’t know exactly how we do that.
Apparently we can put people into owls.
Then Two Real Ones Moved In
Which brings me back to the lemon bush.
The two burrowing owls living there have no knowledge of Mother, Owlie, Childcraft, Jack Tales, my son, or two ceramic birds. As far as I know, they selected their location according to whatever considerations matter to burrowing owls. Suitable dirt may rank considerably higher than literary continuity.
But they did something anyway.
They caused me to reach backward.
Seeing those little birds under the bush brought Owlie into consciousness again. Not the stories—those remain lost—but the existence of Owlie and the feeling attached to him. That in turn brought Mother telling me stories, the Jack Tales, the owl collection and the ceramic father and son back into the same neighborhood of thought.
The birds didn’t know they were doing any of this. They were simply being owls and I did the rest.
That may be the part I find most interesting about the odd relationships humans form with creatures. The animal doesn’t necessarily participate in the relationship we construct around it. My childhood Owlie was imaginary. The ceramic owls were objects. The burrowing owls are very much alive, but whatever relationship I have formed with them exists largely on my side of the property line.
Yet all of them can become connected.
What Did the Owls Actually Bring Back?
If seeing the burrowing owls had suddenly restored one of Mother’s complete bedtime stories, this would be easier to understand. I could say that one owl reminded me of another owl and unlocked a forgotten memory.
That isn’t what happened. I still can’t tell you an Owlie story.
What returned was something less complete and perhaps more interesting: Owlie himself, Mother telling the stories, and a sense that those stories belonged to a particular part of being her little boy. The narrative information seems to have disappeared while some other part of the experience survived.
I don’t know what to call that part.
And my rules of writing for you tell me not to become clever merely because I have reached the place where a clever conclusion would fit. Curiosity is more useful here.
So I wonder.
How much of your life is still inside you in that form? Not available as a story you could sit down and tell, but not entirely gone either. A person without the conversation. A house without the rooms. A song without the words. Something that mattered without your being able to explain anymore exactly why it mattered.
And what does it take to retrieve one? I have no idea.
In my case, apparently, Mother put an imaginary owl into a little boy’s head more than seventy years ago. Most of what she said disappeared. The owl remained somewhere out of reach until two of his distant relatives dug a hole under a lemon bush.
Well, I’ll be damned.
I wonder what else is down there.