I read the list on the back of the photograph twice, with Piper breathing beside me on the blue cooler, and then I put it down on the table between the heron and the eagle and looked at the real picture. All seven of us, uncropped, in front of the fireplace. Me on the end in my red cardigan, laughing at the dog. On the back, in the round handwriting of Jordan, was a short column of names, and the first one, mine, had a neat line drawn through it.
Beneath mine, in the same column, were two more names. Carol, who is the mother of Jordan, a gentle woman of seventy eight who walks with a cane and carries a small oxygen tank. And Walt, the uncle of Ryan, who wears hearing aids and sings loudly at Christmas. Under the three names, Jordan had written in her careful print: Too old for the feed. Crop for color and for younger look. 3. She had underlined the number twice. I was not angry. I was struck, in my chest, by how very sad it was.
Piper pulled at her sleeves, a habit she had from her father. “I found it in the printer tray,” she said. “Mom printed it for a collage and left the back on the glass. I read it and I got so mad, Grandma, I felt sick.” She looked up at me with her chin trembling. “Grandma Carol is the one who taught me to play cards. Uncle Walt taught me to whistle. And you taught me to look at birds. They are the three best people in my family.”
I put my arm around her and held on. A few people passed our table and glanced at the prints, and I smiled and nodded as though nothing was happening. “What do you want to do?” I asked her quietly. She thought about it for a long time, a fourteen year old with serious eyes. “I want Dad to see it,” she said. “I do not want to tell on Mom. But I think she needs somebody to say it out loud.” I told her that she was braver than I was at her age.
To be young is to be told that the world belongs to the beautiful, and to grow wise is to learn that it belongs to those who love.
We drove together to Sandpoint that evening in my old Subaru. Ryan opened the door and went white when he saw his daughter holding the photograph. She handed it to him without a word. He read the back standing in the hall, and I watched him read it, the muscles of his jaw working. Then he turned the picture over, looked at the front, and sat down on the bottom stair. “I had no idea,” he said. “I swear on my life, Mom. I thought it was only a crop.”
Jordan came out of the kitchen drying her hands, and when she saw the paper, she stopped. For a moment I thought she might deny it. Instead, to my surprise, she began to cry. She said she had not meant for anyone to see it. She said she had been in a terrible state since the fall, comparing herself to women on the internet, and that she had begun to see every wrinkle and every cane and every hearing aid as a flaw in the picture of her life. “I was ashamed of getting old,” she whispered. “And I took it out on the people I love.”
I did not say it was fine, because it was not. But I did say that I understood what it is to be frightened of time. I told her that I had spent twenty two summers in a tower on Mica Peak watching lightning cross three counties, and that the only thing I had learned from it was that you cannot argue with a storm. You can only decide who you want standing beside you when it comes. Jordan nodded, wiping her face with the dish towel, and asked if she could hold my hand. I let her.
On Sunday, the whole family came to my house for supper. Carol rode in the front seat, with her tank on her lap, and Walt sat at the end of the table singing grace in a voice that rattled the windows. Jordan had brought the photograph, uncropped, printed large, in a plain wooden frame. She hung it herself over my fireplace. She had posted the same picture that morning on the internet, with a new caption: All of us. Every single one. I am sorry it took me so long.
Piper started coming to Turnbull with me on Saturdays at sunrise, bundled in a wool hat, with a thermos of cocoa and the old Nikon of Neil. I taught her to hold still and let the birds come. She is better at it than I am. In February she photographed a pair of mergansers on the ice, and the picture is so good that the librarian hung it in the lobby of the branch with a card that reads, Piper, age fourteen.
On the last Saturday of the month, just before dawn, we saw something pale on a fence post at the far end of the refuge. Piper raised the camera without a sound. It was a great white owl, large as a cat, with eyes like lamps, watching us over its shoulder. Neil had spent his whole life looking for one. We stayed absolutely motionless for eleven minutes, our breath smoking, while the light came up. Then the owl turned, and Piper pressed the shutter, and it lifted into the gray sky.
That night I opened the bird book of Neil on the windowsill and took up his pencil. I made the two hundred and twelfth checkmark, next to the owl, in his column, and I wrote in the margin the date and the name of the photographer. Piper stood beside me with her chin on my shoulder. “He would have loved her,” I said. “He would have loved all of you.” She nodded. Out in the yard, the chickadees were arguing at the feeder, and the house was warm and full.