The Turquoise Ledge Read Free Page A

precipitation.
    On book tour in Albany I met a young woman who’d grown up on a nearby farm. We were talking about horses as she drove me from the airport. Recently her beloved horse had died. The day after he was buried, she went down to the pasture in the evening to bring in the other horses and when she called them, off in the woods she heard the distinctive whinny of her beloved horse.
    At the moment my dear old Arabian horse died, his stable mate suddenly galloped around the corral whinnying frantically and looking intently toward the south, as if he was trying to follow although he could plainly see his stable mate lying still on the ground.
    After death, it may take some days for the spirit to bid farewell to this world and to the loved ones they want to reassure; so they visit us as birds or other wild creatures to let us know they are in a good place not far away.
    The old folks used to keep a dish on the table and passed it around so everyone might put a pinch of food from their plates into the dish. That was to feed all their beloved family members who had passed to the other world. At the end of the meal, the contents of the dish were burned. Once when I was a small child I visited the neighbor as she cooked fried bread outdoors, and I remember how surprised I was when she flipped the first piece of fried bread from the hot oil into the hot coals and ashes. But then I realized that she’d done it to feed the spirits.
    Within days of his death, my friend James Wright, the poet, made communication with me through the visit one evening of a small burrowing owl that refused to be frightened or startled by me. James especially loved owls, and he’d written about the elf owls in a poem about the Sonoran Desert. He and his wife, Annie, were scheduled to come to Tucson that April for James to read at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, but of course that was never to be.
    Four or five days after my old friend Sheila died in 2004 a small grackle appeared right before dawn while all the other birds were still quiet. The species doesn’t usually venture into the desert and I’d not seen one up here before. The bird made raucous teasing squawks as it did a wild dance of joy on the top of the electric pole next to my house. I recognized right away it was old Sheila joyously on her way. I never again saw a short-tail grackle up here.
    One day around noon in early 2007, an unusually large cactus wren came to the big prickly pear cactus next to my living room window and perched on a cactus pad where wrens and other birds don’t usually land. The wren looked through the window at me and tilted its head back and forth until I paid attention to it. It continued to hop back and forth on the prickly pear quite gaily as it saw me watch it. I turned to Bill and I said, “See that cactus wren? That’s strange behavior. I’ve never seen a bird look through the window before. Someone I know died.” Later that day my father called with the news my dear cousin Lana had died.
    So it seems that after the passing of a friend or loved one, a few days or a week after they go, they manifest their loving energy: the wind chimes tinkle in the twilight though there is no breeze; the chimney of the oil lantern rattles by itself; the electric fan blades make an unusual sound—the realm of the spirit beings and the ancestors contact us from time to time.
    Around the Arctic Circle, the Inuit people believe family and ancestral spirits get reborn again in a few generations. Howard Rock who was Inuit published the first Eskimo newspaper, the Tundra Times . He wrote a beautiful memoir of his childhood, and he published excerpts from it in the newspaper.
    He recalled the time when he was a small child and his parents took him ice fishing, and he caught more fish than any of the adults. Howard was only five years old, so everyone noticed right away this was unusual, and then someone addressed Howard as