paula treick deboard
  • Home
  • About paula
  • Books
    • Here We Lie
    • The Drowning Girls
    • The Fragile World
    • The Mourning Hours
  • paula's blog
  • MISCELLANEA
  • What I'm Reading
  • Contact

Warning: this blog is haphazardly maintained. I blame the author. 

Somewhere an Owl is Watching You

4/11/2023

1 Comment

 
 It’s 10:15 and I’m in my usual writing spot, only a bit later due to a routine dental appointment. Now I’m sipping my skinny vanilla latte, the old standby, and hyperaware of the fluoride coating on my teeth.
 
I have seven more days of class/three-and-a-half weeks/one lit mag launch/one creative nonfiction workshop/one 47th birthday party/one grant-funded discussion/one writing retreat to plan until the end of the semester, and Lord knows I am ready for it all to be done.
 
**
 
The older I get, the less I understand how time passes. It is April 11. Yesterday it hit 80 degrees for the first time, and my students, arriving sweaty to class, pronounced it the official beginning of summer. I have planted some seedlings in the raised bed, and other than two squash which look very sketchy, nothing has died. I’m still in the leggings-under-dresses phase of my annual wardrobe, and it seems both too late to be wearing warm clothes and way too early to be thinking about the punishing heat that will soon be here.
 
**
 
I wrote in an essay-in-progress about something that happened to me recently, followed by my question How the hell did I get here?
 
“What did you mean by that question?” my writing partner asked, tapping her pen against the line. I suppose she was looking for the short-term answer--I got in my car and drove, which was more or less how I’d intended the line when I’d written it, but the answer didn’t seem right to me now, at the moment we were considering it. It seemed more of an existential question, something meant to probe years of decisions and coincidences and accidents, family history, the branches leading backward to the beginning of time.
 
This is the story of how the hell I got here.
 
**
 
At the Starbucks where I park myself for four hours every Tuesday and Thursday, as well as some Fridays-Sundays when life permits, they have a keypad lock on the bathroom door. At times, the baristas sing out the five-digit code to anyone who asks, and at other times, like now, that information is strictly need-to-know. Something must have happened, like vandalism or a patron who wouldn’t leave, and so now when they are asked, the baristas make an effort to conceal their annoyance, come around the corner, and punch in the code for each guest.
 
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I say when I arrive, fresh from an hour in the dentist’s chair, the orange juice I consumed before that heavy in my bladder, “but could you let me into the bathroom?”
 
The barista, her impressive head of hair piled in a high bun on the very top of her head, glances left and right and leans forward. “I’ll just tell you,” she says, and whispers the five digits that I immediately commit to memory.
 
I have passed a test.
 
I have been deemed worthy.
 
**
 
Yesterday, after my last class, three students stayed to talk to me—one making a plea for leniency, another providing an explanation for the wrong file that had been uploaded, the third just needing someone to listen.
 
I was lenient with the first, assured the second that we all make mistakes, listened to the third. I left exhausted and made my way straight to the parking lot.
 
It was still warm—the unofficial start of summer, after all—and students were out and about, sitting on benches, skateboarding past. Two students were taking pictures on the sidewalk next to the building with the owls’ nests, and I stopped to ask if they had seen the owls. It had been weeks now since I last spotted them, before the time change, back when I was leaving campus in the dusk.
 
In response, one of the students pointed—not up to the third floor where the branches from their nests still hung over the louvred shades—but straight ahead, just behind the hedge, to where an owl was watching us.
 
It wasn’t one of the parent owls, with their impressive wingspans and weathered faces, and it wasn’t the baby owlet that had blinked down at me weeks earlier. Except, of course, it was—bigger now, maybe an adolescent, with the cool gaze of a teenager.
 
And once again, I don’t understand how time passes.
 
 
 
 

Picture
1 Comment
Ray Govett
4/11/2023 05:13:41 pm

… Owl, be watching you
(Every breath you take)
(Every move you make)
(Every bond you break)
(Every step you take) owl, be watching you
… Owl, be watching you
… Owl, be watching you
… hoo, hoo

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Paula Treick DeBoard

    Just me.

    Archives

    December 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    January 2023
    December 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    December 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    December 2017
    May 2017
    August 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    June 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    June 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

.[email protected]
  • Home
  • About paula
  • Books
    • Here We Lie
    • The Drowning Girls
    • The Fragile World
    • The Mourning Hours
  • paula's blog
  • MISCELLANEA
  • What I'm Reading
  • Contact