Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver Read Free Book Online Page B

there in the dark, or the ghostly, spine-chilling rasp of a barn owl on the hunt. By day, vermilion flycatchers and western tanagers flash their reds and yellows in the top of my tall window, snagging my attention whenever they dance into the part of my eyesight where color vision begins. A roadrunner drops from a tree to the windowsill, dashes across the window’s full length, drops to the ground, and moves on, every single day, running this course as smoothly as a toy train on a track. White-winged doves feed and fledge their broods outside just inches from my desk, oblivious to my labors, preoccupied with their own.
    One day not long ago I had to pull myself out of my writerly trance, having become aware of a presence over my left shoulder. I turned my head slowly to meet the gaze of an adolescent bobcat at my window. Whether he meant to be the first to read the story on my computer screen or was lured in by his own reflection inthe quirky afternoon light, I can’t say. I can tell you, though, that I looked straight into bronze-colored bobcat eyes and held my breath, for longer than I knew I could. After two moments (his and mine) that were surely not equal—for a predator must often pass hours without an eyeblink, while a human can grow restless inside ten seconds—we broke eye contact. He turned and minced away languidly, tail end flicking, for all the world a cat . I presume that he returned to the routine conjectures and risks and remembered scents that make up his bobcat-life, and I returned to mine, mostly. But some part of my brain drifted after him for the rest of the day, stalking the taste of dove, examining a predator’s patience from the inside.
    It’s a grand distraction, this window of mine. “Beauty and grace are performed,” writes Annie Dillard, “whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” I agree, and tend to work where the light is good. This window is the world opening onto me . I find I don’t look out so much as it pours in.
    What I mean to say is, I have come to depend on these places where I live and work. I’ve grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes. No steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise—no hominid agenda. I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can’t seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children. My tastes are much more extreme: I want wood-thrush poetry. I want mountains.
    It would not be quite right to say I have these things. The places where I write aren’t actually mine. In some file drawer we do have mortgages and deeds, pieces of paper (made of dead trees—mostly pine, I should think), which satisfy me in the sameway that the wren yammering his territorial song from my rain gutter has satisfied himself that all is right in his world. I have my ostensible claim, but the truth is, these places own me: They hold my history, my passions, and my capacity for honest work. I find I do my best thinking when I am looking out over a clean plank of planet earth. Evidently I need this starting point—the world as it appeared before people bent it to their myriad plans—from which to begin dreaming up my own myriad, imaginary hominid agendas.
    And that is exactly what I do: I create imagined lives. I write about people, mostly, and the things they contrive to do for, against, or with one another. I write about the likes of liberty, equality, and world peace, on an extremely domestic scale. I don’t necessarily write about wilderness in general or about these two places that I happen to love in