The Hollow Bird

with my father and mother, at the chapel churchyard

At the Washington Memorial Chapel Churchyard, among the evidence of encampment history, my parents rest. I have arrived with a box built of split logs. It is heavy with wet earth, it is bursting with greens, it is holly and frosted pine combs and a fat red bow, and I say “Here I am,” lowering the box to the ground. Waiting, perhaps, for a whisper back, a movement of air or dirt, but the earth beneath my feet is silent, and the only figure in the polish of the pink-red granite is me, my parents’ oldest daughter growing older, still.

I am not alone. In the far distance a woman stands with her back to the loop road, her head bent, her body motionless. Her husband, I think. Farther down, a man and a woman are planting flags and placing wreathes. Dozens of flags and dozens of wreathes among the cold stones and the tree-root gnarl, between the rise and the fall of the churchyard.

In memory of. In service to.

“We’ll bury her here,” my father and I said, all those years ago, just days past Christmas, and for as long as he could, he visited, sat on a bench and talked until, finally, he joined her in the eternal. He’d planted flowers. I bring wreathes, sunflowers, wooden birds, tulips, ornaments, Easter lilies, sometimes a book I have made, which is to say paper, by which I mean it all fades or floats away—all but the white hollow wooden bird, which has lost its tail, but which yet sits, there on the stone that says their names, their birthing and their dying dates. A carved cross between them. The carved branches of a plattered dogwood tree above. Doves in flight.

I wonder the hollow bird, how it stays. How not rain or wind or snow confounds it. Not the nose of a deer or the caw of a crow or the music that the chapel bells play. I wonder if my parents knew that I would come, that I would never leave them. That Christmas can only be Christmas to me if I find a gift, if I walk the hill, if I stand, head bowed, before them.