Atlas and Alice, Issue 20
Julie Flattery
Fly Away “You should put bird seed on the floor and open up all the windows,” my mom tells me. Her icy blue eyes stare past me at something I cannot see. “But we might get in trouble, Mom, like Eloise, when she went to Paris,” I say, recalling a favorite childhood story. “Remember how she left all of the windows open, and the birds invaded her apartment?” She squeals with delight at the thought of it, then wraps her arms around her waist and winces. Colon cancer does that. It robs you of your dignity and then tries to take away your joy. But she’s not having it.
I moved in with her to help. The living spaces in our condo are upstairs and are lined with windows that look out onto the treetops. “The treehouse,” we call it. We call our balcony “the nest”. Since her cancer diagnosis, she has made a morning ritual of sipping coffee in the nest while enjoying the show of bluebirds, robins, and cardinals as they dart about the live oaks. Now she has a new nest: a home hospital bed personalized with an array of pillows and double-lined with foam mattress toppers to pad her lean, 78-pound body. I bring her tiny animal sculptures to adorn her room and I plug in the fairy lights on a wooden birdhouse—made by her own hands—that lives on a shelf next to the bed. It’s not the balcony, but it has its charms.
My head is resting on the bed next to her and she leans in close. “Never mind me. I just flit about from flower to flower.” “Like a hummingbird?” “Yes!” she says. She laughs again and holds her stomach tight. 38
