santos scribes

All afternoon I listened to the Mourning Doves coo,

this is what they told me: 

“Now Button, we know you wanted a family. You’re a lone wolf now but that isn’t how you came in, not entirely anyway. You have always had a touch of anomaly to you- a little Moses in the basket grows up to part the Red Sea- but there was a time when you did dare to want things and “family” was top of that short list. 

That was when we first took note of you, just after your first New England winter. We’d returned home from southern migration, Louis and me and you, just seven months young were already entering Connecticut’s foster care system. It was for the best, we both agreed- but we’re Mourning Doves, we recognize grief and longing as clearly as the black spots on our gray feathers, could hear it in your tender baby body coos. We spent hours, days even watching you try to make heads and tails of things no fully grown person let alone a baby could never make sense of.

Now the thing about your parents Button, the thing about Sandy & Ned was they were never equip to be parents; to nest and take care of their young- they had too many troubles of their own. Troubles that started long before you arrived and lasted well after you were gone.  

And so as much as we didn’t like it, we knew things weren’t going end well for them. Just as we knew nothing could stop a fiery spirit such as your own from wanting it to- from wishing and waiting for your parents to get well enough to be parents. But the Doves Honest Truth is the writing, and the mourning were already, always on that wall and without proper mortar beneath your sturdy bricks, you weren’t ever going to stick to them, you weren’t meant to Button. 

I know that didn’t stop you from loving them though, from seeing past all that leaky sadness. And they knew it too- your love for them- as much as their fragile minds would let them anyway; there are of course limits to these bodies, limits to our understandings of things.  

And I understand my saying all this now may not do much to soothe the pain, to silence the grief that replaced those coos, but I guess what I’m trying to tell you Button, what Louis and I have been trying to say all these years, is just like mourning and morning have 2 different meanings, family and family can too.”