I Stand at My Sink

It’s early April. I stand at my sink watching the daffodils I planted last fall—I bought the bulbs on sale at a hardware store—begin to bloom, or try to. It’s been snowing and hailing all morning, the temperature right around freezing. The daffodils are mostly small, yellow and orange or white and yellow—nothing like a classic daffodil, but with curls and spikes. And they point the other direction, south, away from the house and toward the sun. I only know the color configurations because the compost pile is on the other side and I see their sun-following faces once every other day or thereabouts when I dump the kitchen garbage.

I planted the daffodils in that spot so I could watch them from the sink—daffodils here have about eight weeks’ worth of blossom time. Most of them are under an apple tree that has fruit with red flesh. The apple is not yet blooming, barely leafing out. And maybe it won’t, not this week: it’s been an odd spring. When the snow and ice came creeping back, all the leaf-positive, spring-hopeful, broad-leaf trees in the forest took a moment and quit putting out any more green. The rusty winter forest has kept steady hold on a weird, lime-green tint for two weeks now. Not-spring. Except for the daffodils. The blossoms on the peach trees have been coated with ice and will probably not set fruit this year. Meanwhile, only a few of the daffodil blossoms have been shredded by hail. The red-fleshed apple tree, pruned to a perfect umbrella skeleton, seems protective. (Those apples make a spectacular pie—the tart taste as well as the bright pink color.) Underneath, the daffodil faces feign innocence, staring southward.

That tree is nearest the house so the elk will feel less inclined to chew on it. Near to the apple is a flowering crab apple, with the woodshed on the other side. The crab apple is about to bust out with a pink and white violence that I can almost hear from where I stand at the sink. Nothing stops a crab apple, not even elk. But it, too, is on hold due to this weather. The weight of the buds is starting to pull the branches down. Bees—where are they in this cold rain?—cannot resist so many flowers. I’m not kidding about loud. The thick wands of blossoms are weighty and so shockingly white and pink and noisy it almost hurts to stand near the crab apple in spring, though the rest of the year I hardly even notice the tree. In full bloom it’s like a spectacular fireworks display frozen by time—buoyed with the distinct intensity of ten thousand honey bees.

Our young border collie is out there by the shed today. She’s waiting for something to show up—anybody, any creature. She’ll chase a bird if nothing else is going on. My kitchen windows are rather dirty because we don’t wash them, ever: that way the songbirds won’t fly into them and get hurt. There are so many fewer songbirds in recent years. Still plenty of robins. Almost no rufous-sided towhees anymore. The birds that do show up seem that much more precious—and notable to the border collie. Last fall she chased a pileated woodpecker back and forth across the orchard for the entire month of September.

I recently admitted to an old friend that I like to stand at the sink and wash dishes. It’s a limited activity, detail oriented. I enjoy looking out the window while I suds and rinse and put things away. There is a road in the distance, several hundred feet away—the house is on one of the few paved roads in a coastal forest, a national forest—which basically means “large government tree farm.” It’s very quiet here, in this house, perched above an empty road on the way to nowhere but a few more houses and millions of trees. The only thing in the forest that moves as fast as the birds are the occasional vehicles on this paved road.

I’ve learned to distinguish diesel motors from gas, cars from log trucks, one kind of semi from another. Sometimes I recognize individual vehicles from the sound, long before I see them. (Like my friend Carolyn’s Prius, the quietest vehicle.) There is an orchard, a field, a creek, and a fence between here—the sink—and there—the road running east and west. Each element of the landscape changes with the seasons, including the traffic. On the other side of the road is a small river (I can’t see into the river unless it is very high, late winter) and on the other side of the river is a forested hill—hawks and eagles glide along the creek bed (and across my sight line) at different heights at different seasons—buzzards too, until they leave for Mexico in October. The little creek between here and the river is folded by a line of alder trees. In the first weeks of Covid, a deer died down by the creek bed, in the alders along the bottom of the creek bed. The leafless trees were full of buzzards for about three weeks. The birds are big and serious-looking and had just returned from Mexico. They seemed tired at first. After that deer died, I learned a lot about buzzard society while cooking and washing dishes. About thirty individuals were here most days. They had distinct personalities, even a sense of humor.  

Buzzards have a strict social structure and are very respectful of the group’s need to eat. They took turns, in a pattern. If anyone got greedy, they’d get inched off the waiting-line branch and made to go back a higher branch or two, or get hopped off to a nearby tree and made to eat last. Buzzards shake their naked heads at each other, like they can’t believe what they just saw or heard from that other fool. Their flapping wings are a sorrowful umbrella each. Buzzards are very polite to the dead, carefully eating in a pattern that honors the parts: first the organs, then the fleshy muscle pieces, the soft cartilages next, and finally the skin and sinews. Until that last bit, the dead lie as still as they fell while each part is carefully removed from inside and the outer layers peeled away.  The birds walk around methodically and seem to carefully consider each peck. At the last, they pull the skeleton apart, dispersing the bones over an area about as big as my kitchen. A veritable fiesta, the finale, and hard work. The whole process a beautiful two-week funeral.

Obviously I went and checked their progress, daily. Peering from the bank above, I always waited until near the end of the day, once everyone had had their chance to eat. While it’s weird to say that a dead deer is gorgeous, maybe all the revered attention made her shine that way. The buzzards bringing the glory of it all. The deer had been dying since the start of spring—sitting in the barn field in the afternoons, spending the night under a big fir tree near the chicken house, joining her group at the edge of the forest at dawn. She had a wasting disease that came to this area in the 1990s and wiped out more than half the deer population. The affected deer start out by looking a little ragged, their coats quite dark and patchy. Then their bellies distend and drop. They graze slower and slower. Some deer, however, appear to be resistant to the disease; they’ve been slowly repopulating the area. But not all the offspring are resistant and those don’t live more than a couple-three years at most. This deer had one companion until the end—a yearling that must have been her fawn from a year before. The morning we woke up and heard the buzzards in the trees—dozens of umbrellas opening and closing quickly (we hadn’t even looked out the window yet)—we knew she had died. The daffodils were blooming then too, facing her direction exactly, nodding in regard.

By now I’ve probably spent years standing at this sink. The actual sink is from my mother’s house in San Jose, California. Her house was built in 1908. She bought it in 1975 and re-modeled in the 80s. The sink is iron and enamel, pitted yet sturdy, and I couldn’t have a better sink for the way I use a kitchen, which is way too much and for too many things including washing shoes and boots and cleaning paint brushes—things you would do with a utility sink, which I don’t have.

Four windows—two sets of sliders—reach across the counter and above the sink. The windows frames and sills are wood, so today they look pretty worn and stained and sun bleached. A day doesn’t pass that I don’t consider my plan to refinish the wood and put a marine varnish on the frames and sills. The green-brown tiles around the sink are getting a bit chipped and a little cracked. I re-do the caulking about every other year—I’m not great at it but there are no plumbers around here. The faucet eats washers; I replace the hot water washer every summer.

Standing at the sink at night (and especially early in the morning when it’s dark outside, when there is no moon) I listen to the radio—news programs, mostly. (On moonlit nights I often don’t turn on any electric lights while I clean the kitchen.) There used to be only one radio station we could access out here, though now there are several. But the one public radio station is still the best signal. Most of the major world events in my lifetime have been reported to me while I stood here at the sink—certainly they’ve been picked apart and examined at every angle, by the experts, to the clatter of forks and plates and pot lids. During Covid, since I didn’t go anywhere, really, I bought a thick wool runner, brightly colored, to go on the tile floor in front of the whole kitchen counter. It’s pure luxury to stand on and looks rather festive, too.

The sink, the house, the land, the idea of living in a national forest (where I do not always live—I have worked all over the U.S. at different parts of my life) fell to me in an odd way and I picked it up. I often wonder if it’s luck or circumstance or stubbornness that keeps returning me here. It’s a beautiful spot, not practical—for many years it felt like an albatross (I spent every spare minute and dime keeping it functional) and then like a complete luxury, also a refuge from bad jobs and rough relationships. In March 2020 my wife and I came here for spring break (we are teachers) and immediately switched our courses to digital platforms—a grand pivot for everyone. We had terrible wildfires that year, lost friends and family members to sudden illness (not just Covid), adopted a couple of dogs—all the usual things you’ve heard about the pandemic. The strangest thing about that year (and the following year, when our courses remained online) was standing at the sink: while I looked out the window it seemed like nothing had actually changed. The forest did its usual thing. The seasons came and went, we planted a garden, the daffodils came along, the elk herd traipsed through the orchard and trashed some stuff, I planted a few more fruit trees. Time plowed along like the bulldozer it is.

I cleaned the sink today—scrubbed with Bon Ami and let it sit to whiten. Might have been the 3000^th time I’ve done that, I don’t know. There’s a tomato plant on the sill this spring, blooming like crazy against the cold window while waiting to get outside and down to business. There’s my mother’s favorite tea pot and a deep purple calla lily someone brought us for Easter. Hanging above the sink is a marvelous wooden spoon carved by a friend and neighbor who died many years ago. When I stand here, the counter is never completely clear of clutter and neither is my head. But the one place I see empty, in my life and on the regular, if things are going well, is this sink. Clearing away the mess—that’s laudable. Filling it again? Every spoon, plate, flower stem, shoelace, sponge mop. Nothing around my sink is ever still, just marvelously slow and circular. Before the snow gets any worse I’ll take out the compost and pick a few of those foolhardy daffodils for the kitchen table.

© 2022, Audrey Colombe