Grove of Owls

After sitting down for dinner at Dad’s, we heard it, a call louder than our conversation and more insistent than the steaming squash and steak I’d been serving. More potatoes? I asked, not trusting what I’d heard, a dog-like cry biting into nightfall.

Dad’s next-door neighbor Corinne looked up from her plate. Let’s go see, she said. She stood and walked to the deck without waiting for the rest of us. My brother, partner, dad, and I slid into the matte-black cold behind her.

The call, in the trilled r’s of what we now realized was an owl, came louder from a cedar. There was a grove of owls when we moved in here, Dad said, describing how he and Mom chose this site in the woods forty years ago, the owls sustaining their home on the mountain despite our house growing in the midst of theirs.

We waited for another call until the owl flew away, the outline of its over-sized wingspan floating from one cedar to the other. There it goes we said together, our hushed voices as intent as the owl’s had been. Even after it disappeared into a neighboring tree, we inhaled the cold and listened for its next call—an assertion of home or a search for dinner—before heading back inside to finish our own.