Published 6:30, DECEMBER 16, 2025

THERE ARE SO many ways in. Doors, four in all, and only one with a screen. Windows, a total of fifteen, most of their screens torn, bent, or missing. Seams yawning between brick and roof, chimney tops never properly capped, rotting fascia and a crumbling foundation: basement to attic, floorboard to ceiling, our home is porous. Until we renovated it, an attached garage had an off-kilter barn door, an uneven concrete floor, powdery brick. Not hard to gain entry there either.

I like open windows and doors. They welcome light unreservedly. They grant wind and rain, hail and snow, fair passage. Open doors and windows make me appear more friendly than I am and less isolated than I feel. The truth is, I am all that I think about most of the time and cannot decide if this is pathetic or purposeful—or both. Ask me again tomorrow: I’ll be thinking about it—me—still.

Mosquitos and wasps enter the house on occasion and must die for their mistake. But spiders in corners of sticky webbing, centipedes cruising drains, fruit flies, black flies and moths, carpenter ants, pharaoh ants, beetles and gnats, all live comfortably within these walls. They are here right now; they have been here for generations. Such creatures may call the structure field and forest, town and district. They may call it kingdom and known universe. Who are we to dispute their understandings of spaces? Don’t we also dwell in dusk and muck, in drains and cobwebs and basement corners, assuring ourselves, like children playing on a beach, that every sandcastle we construct is a cathedral, every sand hill the Himalayas?

Anyway, it is the animals I am curious about. Better: I am curious about their apparent curiosity with our lives. To them, we must be jarring noises and putrid smells, strange shadows, blockages of light. Why would our burrows, our caves, our—speaking plainly—minimum-security facilities, be of any interest? A global health crisis has not granted us more substance or appeal. Better neighbours we suddenly are not.

I won’t say the animals are encircling the house. That is too military, hinting of strategy rooted in subterfuge, a prelude to invasion and overthrow, folks needing to be killed and earth scorched. To say such a thing, foresee such a bloody drama, would be to confuse pathologies. It would be to still be thinking mostly about myself and my kind.

BEGIN WITH THE birds. How abundant they are these days, colours radiant and calls amplified. A half dozen varieties are present in our yard, all common. Bruising, helmet-headed blue jays rule the roost. They flutter onto the tops of fences and splash into puddles. They stomp about, truncheons slapped into palms for effect. Other birds keep their distance of them. Fixating on the metallic blue and sensing the innate aggression, I keep my distance too.

Darting cardinals abort landings at the mere sight of a jay. A cardinal glimpsing, in contrast, lifts spirits. This past summer a couple decided to nest in a bush off our front porch. My wife and I—also a couple, although we made our babies long ago—positioned chairs on the porch, as if at an outdoor theatre, to watch them flash from tree to bush to tree, delivering their payloads, building their house.

So fleet are these birds that we can’t be sure if one has passed before our eyes, lightning streaks across our retinas, or if we still carry the visual memory of a previous red-orange disruption. Cardinals have no time to waste. Or have they no time at all? They seem in perpetual haste. Or do they never hurry any (non) minute of any (non) day? Sitting on our porch, our own suspended days spooling out in long minutes, with much identified time ahead to negotiate, we wonder about this.

But cardinals are also flying into a window in our family room. The birds steer headlong into the glass, smack it hard, and then drop below. I’ve heard the thwump, the sound of a snare drum muffled with a towel, and witnessed the glass darken into distressed colour. On reaching the window, the ground outside has been........

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