A Little Golden Book and Yellow Roses

My grandmother’s book of birds, mosaics of memory, and gratitude.

Amy Cowen

May 12, 2024

Oil paintings by Matthew cowen — Oil paintings. M. Cowen

“A bird does not sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” — Maya Angelou

Happy Sunday!

I am glad to see you. I have missed some of you in recent weeks. My letters seem to be getting lost in the mail.

I did not really plan to write anything about Mother’s Day.

I didn't have all my ducks in a row. I say things like, “it was a hospital week,” and I know people slide over the words. But I recognize more and more the pattern of stillness a week like this brings, a heaviness, an immobility. I put one foot in front of the other. I keep things normal. I work. I show up. The trash goes out. I do all the things. But the cloak of stillness is hard to push through. Plus, it’s been hot, eighties in the house, sticky and stultifying. I am longing for the fog.

I didn't plan on a Mother's Day post. I know there will be many wonderful posts this weekend shared and reshared by the popular stacks, perspectives on all sides. I felt a bit bad, actually, that what I wrote and intended to post this weekend was about retreating and about hissing turtles.

🐢 My timing might have been a bit off.

But a yellow rose was in my head, and an image, a single photograph of my mom and my grandmother in pastel colored dresses, one blue and one pink, on a Sunday morning, both wearing white gloves, both squinting into the sun.

I think, too, of an image of a little girl in front of a field of flowers, a white dress and matching bonnet. The flowers are, maybe, daffodils. (How happy my Wordsworth-loving heart is to think that.) I never understood the image. There is a car in the scene, and, when I used to think of this image, which I wasn’t sure was real, I always somehow thought they pulled off the side of the road heading home from somewhere and stood me in a field of flowers to take the picture. I always thought it was a roadside photo, and that always alarmed me.

How old is she? Maybe four? She has to be less than six.

I don’t have the photo, but I now have a small oil painting based on the photo. The painting, too, is hazy, a bit blurry overall, a smudge of memory captured in sienna and blue. It’s the kind of painting you look at from across the room. The face is indistinct. I only know it is me because I’ve been told it is me. I want to draw close and somehow understand, recognize, and know her, but the details break down. Get too close, and she dissolves into a pool of paint.

The painting reframes the story. This clearly wasn’t a highway moment. The painting has details I didn’t have. The Easter basket, the building in the background, the angle of the car…. I read the painting differently than I read the image in my memory through the years. It is easy to weave a new narrative, one probably closer to the truth and yet still made up.

I look at the painting, a painting that matches some sliver of memory that has floated in and out of view for years, and somehow I know my mother, the presence of my mother, in the sweet white dress, the white hat, the Easter basket. I see in this frozen moment beautiful light, a softer time.

Thinking about the photo of my mother and grandmother in their pastel dresses, and remembering that I coupled it with photos of yellow roses a few years ago for a set of drawing prompts1, I went looking to see what I might have written about yellow roses through the years.

Yellow roses, hummingbirds, jelly on crackers, butterscotch candies. I could have gone any direction. But I always think of yellow roses.

Surely they have come up in my stories, in my notes, in my attempts to collage an image from the bits and pieces of my broken memory.

In the middle of the night one night, I started searching in Evernote, where all my old files have gone to die, which has a lot to do with the second Substack I am still considering.

I found a mention of yellow roses from an episode of the Creative Mom Podcast in 2010, Episode 149.

2010: I had been trying to head off a [kid temper] problem. Looking out the window and noticing the roses, I tried to distract him:

The days are slipping... there was an art show... there were paper mache dragons... there were fiber collages for the school auction... there have been lanyards... there was some time poking around string art sites... and tonight... as I sit here ready to consider these notes again... there is what seems to be a full moon out the window... I didn't even know... I looked out the window earlier, trying to distract one and circumvent problems that have become all too familiar... all too common...
I saw that the roses in the yard are all in bloom... the yellow bushes in the raised bed are full... many large blooms already softened and falling off... overgrown and overblown.... but numerous buds, tightly closed, their yellows bright against the greens. Still trying to talk enough to change the flow of events... I told him about his great grandmother... who loved yellow roses. Not a life history... but a first name... and then a middle name. The next moments still unfolded wrongly... but now, at night's end, I'm left in my head with the view of those roses... and with saying my grandmother's name out loud, sharing it, remembering, and knowing that I'll do it many times before it becomes a name that they halfway know in their heads.

Fourteen years ago. The boys are grown now. The roses have gone untended. They probably still don’t know her name.

That journal scrap was a flicker of yellow, but I kept looking, scanning files in the search results. It really is a digging and sifting process through years and years of notes and almost 500 podcast episodes.

Another hit on “yellow roses” turned up a podcast essay from 2008. It does have a mention of yellow roses, but it is about birds. At the time it was part of Episode 80. Of course, I didn’t remember it until I saw it.

I decided to reshare it today.

(Note: This piece feels very “2008 me,” but that happens when you dive backwards. In some ways, I sound the same today, uncannily so. In other ways, I like to think I’ve grown. I like to think my writing has grown. I had a particular way of writing my notes for the podcast.... because they were intended to be spoken.... lots of ellipses. I hesitated to edit the essay on that level because the writing and the spoken cadence were all bundled together. The writing was a map for speaking. But, sharing the actual written words now, I did go through and clean things up, swapping commas for my ellipses, breaking things into clearer syntactical units without really changing anything. I am aware though that some of the structure is a product of being written to be spoken, so forgive anything that seems unwieldy.)

For context: I did a “bird project” in 2007-2008, in which I was tracking birds and looking for birds, writing about birds, and drawing birds every day. It was an intentional and dedicated year of looking at and learning about birds, learning what I see, and learning to identify the birds around me. It was a year-long scavenger hunt.

It was a magical year in that way.

This essay is about a book that I remembered, a book that had been my grandmother’s.

In the way of most things related to memory, for me, things are always pieced together, always hazy, always a layering of time and image and wisps of memory.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have a peaceful day.

Amy

P.S. As I rummaged through old photos, I got nostalgic. The boys. The youth. The skinny me. Their smiles. Their hair. My hair. The birds. The art. The early quilted pillows, a precursor to years of shared quilting. Forgive me for indulging.

Boys sitting with monkey statues — The boys, early 2009 (because this is a post in that timeframe). A. Cowen

A Book of Birds

My memory is a fractured thing. So many blanks. So many little pieces and threads and slivers, ones that often leave me wondering why that is what I remember. Why that moment? Why that expression? Why the sound of that particular song?
I saw a photo of a Christmas ornament last month, a mosaic bird, captured in black and white, so still and quiet, an ornament full of memory for the owner, a historical piece.
A mosaic taking the shape of a bird. In the quiet piecing of so many individual squares, such a perfect embodiment of memory. The image helps me make sense of the pieces of memory and history, slivers of the 37 years that have gone before, fragments that I continue to gather, an eternal and endless quest, always an undercurrent of my days even when pushed far into the recesses of my mind.
This is the journey of memory, the gathering of pieces as they appear in my consciousness, triggered by something in the present, the gathering of pieces, which go together to form a history, a landscape, a story… of me.
In my memory, a small turquoise blue book appeared last year, a book so long forgotten, but suddenly so there. A powerful image. A blue book… a yellow bird on its cover… small… square… a rocking chair by a window… a house with an arched doorway between the dining room and kitchen… A place mostly forgotten, and yet a moment, a still life, crystallized in my head, hinging on that little book… and the sighting of robins out the window… in the snow… and then… later… the hummingbirds. Such a love of hummingbirds… all brought into focus with the memory of a little book of birds.
That little turquoise book has teased at my memory, popped up time and again as new awareness to the birds has blossomed within me, as the birds began marking my days, unmistakable at times, signs, symbols, harbingers of meaning. They are so with me now, the birds, so unexpected at this point in my life. And yet now that I’ve seen them, now that I watch them, and listen, and look, and marvel, and understand, I realize what a deep need they have filled within me.
And always, just out of reach, memory of that little book, my grandmother's book.
I hope that book exists in my mind because I stood with her, looking through that book, trying to figure out what we might have seen through the window of that house, a house on a hill, a house symbolic of a move that changed and defined our lives, a move to mountains and a slower way of life.
It feels right that there are birds attached to my memory of that move, the spotting of a robin, the flash of a red breast in the snow, seen through the window on a winter’s day.
Yes, I hope that I stood there with her. I wish I knew that for sure, and yet the memory is mine, however unformed, however unproven. It is a moment that seems so small, the barest of threads, trivial to some, and yet a silken thread for me, one that I hold dear in my memory of her. That thread gives contour to other scattered memories that have remained present for me, memories of a special relationship, one that deepened with time, one that I will forever miss.
In hearing me mention this little book, this scrap of aqua blue, someone else also remembered such a book and tracked it down, offered a glimpse of the cover, a glimpse that took my breath away, for it was clear, finally, that the scrap of memory was at least partly true. Memory, so tenuous, sometimes so hard to sort out. And yet, such a book existed, a Golden book, a pocket guide to birds of North America.
Through the long summer, there were so many birds, several that became particularly important for me, several that have haunted my memory of those months, several that have become central to my identification as an artist and as a writer.
As a parent, I have come to understand that the birds are something I must give my children. It is a process which has begun, for as I’ve watched, or stopped to watch, or caught my breath in the seeing or hearing, the boys have been with me. More and more often, now, they spot the birds. They see. They watch. And in those moments, a tiny hand stretching to point at a bird flying away, I understand the power of this, something so simple, so easy to give, and yet, so often overlooked.
The magic of this, the slowing down to notice the hummingbird at the bush, the blue bird on the tree, the crow passing overhead, the sound of birds in the red trees against the gray sky… These are things my children are learning. These are things that I didn’t realize I had in me to give them. In my own looking and newfound awareness, there is a circle, a continuity, and a passing on. And someday, I hope they remember.

Two young boys with binoculars — My young birdwatchers, 2008. Amy Cowen

Someday, I hope they have homes of their own, and feeders, and bird books, and an awareness, always, of the birds. Maybe they will have the sense that their love of birds began, long ago, with a simple walk from the car to school, a walk on which we stopped to watch a bird in front of us, not wanting to scare it away before we’d had time to admire it.
When the holiday boxes arrived from my mother, boxes of presents, I moved them to a safe place out of the way. Only later were they unpacked and placed around the tree, and I was told, “Your mother sent you your grandmother’s bird book.”
And my heart stopped. Having heard me mention the book (on the podcast), my mother had told me that she thought maybe she had it. But she hadn’t mentioned that she’d found it, retrieved it from one shelf or another, and tucked it into the box, sending it on its way to me.
My heart stopped, and yet, how puzzled I was when it was handed to me.
Not the small book.
Not the pocket guide.
The same publisher, certainly.
The same color.
Birds on the cover.
But not the yellow and black bird from my memory.
An expanded version. A bigger book. Still small. Paperback sized, but thick. Not the small book I remember holding.
At some point, beyond my memory, she must have acquired a new book, a larger one, one that would give her new keys to the birds outside her window.
This was a gift from my mother, the seeking and finding and passing on of the book. No warning it was coming. No mention it had been found. Just quietly tucked in the box to be discovered. A gift of family.
It was a day or so later that I sat, in the morning, alone in the dark of pre-dawn and the quiet of a sleeping house, the lights of the tree on behind me, the days of Christmas fast approaching. I sat and flipped through the book, noticing things about it in comparison to other, newer bird books I’ve held in recent months. Similarities. Differences. At one point, curious about the location noted for a certain bird, I checked the publication date. 1983.
A page of woodpeckers and flickers open before me, I saw a squiggly red line across the top of the page.
A mark.
And my heart leapt. In that moment, it flashed through my head that maybe there were notes in this book. No one in my family, other than me, has ever been a note taker, but there was this red line. Maybe…
But as I flipped through the book, there were no other marks. None. Not a single word in her handwriting, no checkmarks next to particular birds she may have seen, no dates, no folded pages.
There is power in holding this book of hers, knowing she used it when she looked out to watch the birds. The two things I most identify with her, two threads that never fail to bring her to mind, are the hummingbirds and the yellow roses. Two symbols and a song, “His eye is on the sparrow.”
I don’t know that I ever knew about the roses, but my mother did. On the day my grandmother died, yellow roses bloomed in my mother’s yard. And I bet there were birds. We just weren’t looking. We did not see.
Today, I am looking. Today, I see. This will be a new year of birds, and I will make notes, add my own squiggles and annotations and sketches. I can only hope that someday, whatever book becomes my bird book will be one my children remember, one that is someday held with as much awe as I held this one.
My birds will be marked. My stories will be there, my words, my art, and the essence of my own discovery of the birds.
A mosaic of understanding and awareness of self and artist and motherhood, it all came together in a season of birds, a season of birds that has carried over into a new year, and, I hope, into a lifetime of seeing and knowing.

After this podcast episode in 2008, a listener found and gave me a small pocket Golden book of birds. It was a similar color and had different birds on the cover but still not the yellow and black one of my memory. That one was from 1949.

I don’t know at this point which book I remember or why I carry the image of a yellow bird on the cover. I assume my memory is faulty, that the blurry strand I have is incomplete, and my brain has filled something in.

Looking back at the old essay and then picking up the two Golden books from my shelf this week, I think that what I thought all those years ago was a mark my grandmother had made is actually something printed in the book. It feels really strange to realize I may have misunderstood what I was seeing, probably so hoping to see something written in her hand.

I don’t know that any of the memory is true. Although there was a move, and a house and an arched doorway, and a hill, and a rocking chair, and a window, and snow. It is all hazy, just a flicker, as so many memories are. And I know that my mother reading this post might doubt all of these details. Our memories are always locked and rooted in who we were at the time and our age and what we did or did not know. I am okay with a bit of ambiguity in this soft image, one I hold close.

On this Mother’s Day, I think of both of these mothers, and I am grateful.

Looking back at this essay brought back my year of birds, and I scrolled through some old photos looking at the drawings. That year, I drew birds and birdhouses on shipping tags. A year of birds.

Drawings of birds on shipping tags — Assorted birds (and birdhouses) drawn on shipping tags. A. Cowen 2008

That year was still early in my discovery of myself as an artist (not just a writer) as an adult. Looking back this week at images of those shipping tags, an early series, felt poignant. Hopefully my line has evolved since then, but the year holds a special place in my heart. I am grateful for those of us to share this awareness and an approach to life that includes appreciating the birds.

Weekly Bits and Pieces

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“There are things you can’t reach. But
You can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of god.

And it can keep you busy as anything else, and happier.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
As though with your arms open.”

― Mary Oliver

Made It?

Thank you for reading. It’s nice to get comments. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.

I don’t fit with the “cool kids” here at Substack. This isn’t news, but I’m really feeling that. And today’s post…. is partly an old post. I feel that, too. That was a much younger me, a me with two kids under seven, a me who thought I had books in me, a me who thought the podcast would amount to something. We’re all older now.

I hope you think about a special thread of connection with someone in your family. I hope you make a list of some of the symbols or images that are special to you or that make you remember or that conjure an image.

What bird did you see today?

I am fortunate on this Mother’s Day, and I am grateful for so many things and so much goodness. But I also know that the day is complicated for many in so many ways. I think this post from November of last year might be fitting today for some. If that is you, I wish you a peaceful day. I hope you know you are loved. I hope you make it a good day in ways that matter to you.

Thank you to those who continue to read and support this space. It means the world.