Outside My Window

The mid-morning sun barrels through the window onto the table, refracting through the stems of last night’s empty wine glasses. Shadows of the wrought iron fence imprint so perfectly on the window, it’s like a decal. The Zia symbol in the fence creeps onto the window as the sun shifts in the sky. The dead leaves of last year cling to the hibernating trees that have no idea that the ghosts of their past still linger. Everything is still, but there is still some life. Honeysuckle climbing the iron bars lie unmoving, ivy continues to climb a probably-dead Russian silverberry tree, and a euonymus appears to not even notice it’s winter. It’s sometimes difficult to tell, here in central New Mexico, that it’s winter outside. It’s warm inside and the clear blue skies and bright sun mimic early spring, tempting people outside with false promises of warmth.

My garden walls are adorned with clay suns with varying expressions on their faces. That’s *suns* not *sons* but they still have faces. Usually smiles, sometimes smirks. Sometimes it's a moon. One in particular looks like the moon showed up next to the sun unexpectedly, and the sun looks deeply offended. Some of then were already here when we moved in, but we decided to keep them because they’re fantastic, and my grandfather’s house had an entire wall of suns in his patio. They remind me of him every time I look outside.

We’re lucky to have such a private yard and patio. Our house was designed specifically for an indoor-outdoor lifestyle, something that we can do increasingly later and earlier in the year as the climate changes. The walls are eight feet high on the back and six on the sides, made of concrete bricks covered with stucco. Very southwest. We’ve added fencing onto the six-foot walls to make them higher for added privacy. Perks of not living in a place with an HOA.

The birdbath sits still, empty, unvisited. During the warmer months, it’s active with life. Now, the dead basil and lily stocks surround the bone-dry ceramic disc and the slightly leaning pedestal that I tell myself I’ll fix at the start of every year. It remains in perpetual shadow this time of year because it’s so close to the southern wall. It’s easy to forget it even exists.

Thrasher, as we’ve come to call him, is the only bird left in the yard in the winter. He shows up every winter, with his wickedly curved beak and orange eyes, after all the other birds have fled to warmer skies. He bounces around, pecking at the ground, at trees, sometimes at the window. Occasionally, we’ll hear him strutting on top of the metal sunroom roof, which echoes loudly throughout the house. He’s a pain, and our neighbor definitely doesn’t like him, but we do.

He’s a reminder, in conjunction with the flora that still sport leaves, that winter is temporary. Now that the solstice is weeks behind us, the days are getting noticeably longer. It’s all a reminder that eventually, everything will start coming back to life. Eventually, the varied birds will return en masse. And that sunlight and blue sky will no longer be a will-o-the-wisp in the woods, but will be an accurate depiction of what we long for at this point in winter: warmth, fresh air, to be outside.