[ book excerpt: memoir ]

M.A.C. Farrant: “Little Brown Birds” and “Someone”

“But you can’t force these things,” M.A.C. Farrant concedes in the opening pages of Seventy-Two Seasons: A Memoir About Noticing. 

Farrant continues, colouring in the background of her personal project about, well, noticing: “I wasn’t trained to notice nature beyond scenery-viewing, beyond capturing the object of my attention in a photograph or in a memory. As a family, we didn’t camp, fish, hike or even go for walks, and so had no close association with nature, though some of us tap-danced in a rehearsal hall, ice skated in an arena or swam in the ocean—the ocean existing expressly for this purpose, and none other.”

With intriguing titles (“Western Skunk Cabbage,” for instance, and “Return of the Giant House Spiders”), the book’s brief chapters—seventy-three of them—expound on the act of noticing. And, aligning with one of the book’s ancestors, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Farrant’s book reflects on both the observer and the observed (while agreeing with John Berger, in another classic from the ‘70s, whose Ways of Seeing states, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”)

In “World Wonders,” the memoir’s foreword, Farrant (My Turquoise Years: A Memoir, Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces) provides further glimpses of the project, with its roots in family outings decades ago: “Driving around, we’d be after a change of scenery, something different from looking out our living room window at the traffic of Cordova Bay Road where we lived, something to break the monotony of living in a small house with its modest garden, and also the monotony of our lives with their predictable routines.” 

Perhaps, for themselves, twenty-first-century readers can capitalize on Farrant’s trial-and-error approach, which she describes as a “useful practice for noticing, with the aim of enlarging my experience of the natural world by learning to stay spellbound and present in it. To do this, I have focused on things around me—seventy-two times a year. The choices I have made are personal, arbitrary, and particular to the southern tip of Vancouver Island, which is where I live.”

The British Columbia Review would like to thank M.A.C. Farrant and publisher Ronsdale Press for permission to reprint the following excerpts. —BJG

* * *

Little Brown Birds

It’s 6 p.m. and night is a good four hours away. This being June, we surrender ourselves to music!

Open the windows, listen to the song of the little brown birds. They’re everywhere, like flocks of older women, one of whom I have now become. Almost invisible and with rounded bodies and bright, inquisitive eyes, we’re as numerous and hardy as the little brown birds—fondly called LBBs.

Invisibility is not always a bad thing—in nature or in older life. For women, it can mean freedom. There is no longer the requirement to be haute couture beautiful; you can say what you like because “it is etiquette to be courteous to the aged, however offensive and tiresome they may be”; if you so choose, you no longer have to give dinner parties, produce Christmas, or take the grandchildren for the month of August because, “sorry, that doesn’t work for me”; you can lavish any amount of pampering upon yourself. As a result, many woman LBBs are deliriously happy creatures. They do lunches, bus tours, cruises, yoga. They volunteer. In groups of three or more, they visit spas for massages and pedicures. They play golf and belong to book clubs.

Their counterparts, the men LBBs, are often spotted having coffee together at McDonald’s on a Tuesday morning, or on a golf course—rain or shine—intrepid in groups of four, wearing their special shoes and gloves and trundling along in their little carts. Other times, they’re seen together with plastic cups full of beer at hockey or ball games and eating burgers, telling jokes, punching each other in the shoulder. Some men LBBs ride road bikes in flocks of ten or more, all of them wearing brightly coloured plumage and chirping away as they speed past you. Their usual attire, though, is jeans or shorts, a ball cap or Tilley hat. Even tall, thin older men somehow take on the appearance of their tiny bird counterparts by being ubiquitous yet strangely unseen.

In the bird world, wrens are included in the LBB category, and also sparrows, chickadees, finches and bush tits. These are known as the “big five,” or sometimes the “small five,” though identifying a single species is difficult because all little brown birds look alike, at least to the novice bird watcher, at least to me. They are also a source of metaphors, such as the one that occurs to me about LBBs incessantly picking at the suet hung from a branch beneath our kitchen window and looking like frantic shoppers at a sale bin.

Spotting a single LBB in the wild means a change in your fortune, by the way. I didn’t make this up—the Internet did. If one flies into your window and dies—a bird, that is, not a shopper—well, it’s (bush) tit’s up for one of the inhabitants. On the other hand, if a single LBB visits you on your deck or during a walk, good luck is heading your way. Interesting, isn’t it, how we humans always attach good and bad luck to sightings of wildlife? What does this mean? That we are insecure creatures at heart, always in need of mystical insights to guide us on our way?

On the spiritual front, it’s said that if an LBB flies into your home it could be an omen from an angel. Think of that—an actual angel. I have yet to discover what, exactly, that respective angel’s omen might be, so we are free to make up a good one.

LBBs may be small and plain, but they are characterized by being resilient and resourceful, and they have an audacious song comprised mainly of loud trills and buzzes, something that we, their human counterparts, excel at emulating. This happens most frequently late on a Friday afternoon when, gripped by an inexplicable joy of life, we turn up the music and prepare to dance the night away.

Someone

At first, I thought the structure in the image was a listing telephone pole and wondered what it was doing on a rocky beach. Then I saw it was a piece of beach art.

Someone had made it, found a long piece of driftwood, adorned the top of it with sticks and kelp, and then manoeuvred it into an upright position. How, I can only imagine. From a distance it looks like a misplaced palm tree, a renegade from Palm Springs, wintering in our cooler northern climate.

“Someone” figures a lot in my life. They are all strangers to me, but I come upon their presence regularly. Someone created the above beach art. Someone left a painted rock that said “Love” balanced on a boulder on the trail to Warrior Point. Someone put a Santa Claus hat on a roadside rock stack because it was Christmas. Someone made the rock stack.

Someone is always leaving a trace of themselves behind for someone else to find (you never meet the someone), and when you come upon what has been left, it’s like receiving a gift, the best kind, one you didn’t expect to receive and never dreamed of wanting.

You “receive” the gift by noticing it, delighting in it, and acknowledging that someone left it anonymously. Someone was here, the gift seems to be saying, and so are you, another someone.

These special someones are not to be confused with the household variety, as in, someone left the fridge door open, the light on in the hall overnight, mud all over the kitchen floor, or someone overwatered the poinsettia, so now it’s dead. Or the someone who left a bag of dog poop at the end of our driveway. Or the reviled someone who let their pet wall lizards out of the cage in 1967.

The someone I am applauding here is a benign and kindly creature and means no harm. Someone who goes about the world sharing their tokens of quiet wonder.

Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome (AD 161), wrote about someone in his Meditations—a book of profound understanding and an anomaly for those times when rulers were more or less ruthless. He asked why it should astonish us that everything that is happening in the world is happening at the same time?

And we are astonished. Astonished by the realization that the world is filled with a profusion of life forms all going through their life cycles simultaneously, and that some of these life forms are human someones with their own thoughts, emotions and reasons, as you are with yours. It’s a staggering thought, like contemplating the unfathomable number of galaxies in the universe. But when, back on Earth, someone leaves a gentle gift, a trace of presence in our speck of the here and now, it reminds us that we are all connected, we are not alone.

Once, someone played a saxophone across the water from a house we were renting. It was a still, grey afternoon in winter, and the sound of it was so plaintive, so pure, it brought tears.

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster