if, when you wake, the back of your throat is as ashy as moth wings / if, recently, life has stung like a hangnail / weighed heavy like a wet clothesline / ripened with joy in time for spring like stippled chlorophyll / if you’ve ever yearned to be a light mote / velvet / the wind / anything other than human / if you are feeling all feelings these days / amplified and visceral / then you must read / If A Sparrow / by Maria Theresa Maggi.  

I grew up in a 944 square foot condo at the base of a hill where aphids and mosquitos built communes. The condominium was a continuous ebb and flow of renters, particularly single mothers and their daughters. My girlhood consisted of squishing skin, prepped with temporary tattoos, into puddles and sweet saliva running down the spoon of Chucharita Rica. Maybe it was youth, or simple proximity, but friendships came easy. There was no attempt to fit in, because everything we had was the same. The unit exteriors were painted the color of a peach-tan crayon. The courtyard had a maple tree we climbed. The bushes of heather always sat naked, as our chubby fingers slashed and plucked each speck of purple. Our kitchens all had a bar countertop we would hover over, spilling chocolate milk and secrets. The windows were prone to sobbing fits; condensation fractured views of the skyline hazed by a neighbor’s smoke break.   

Every spring, an orchestra of ladybugs hatched in my room. They clung to the popcorn ceiling. For most of my childhood, I believed the phenomenon to be something lucky—as if my soul attracted the presence of them—and not just the result of deteriorating weather-strip. I would cup the ladybugs and take them outside. 

In condominium living culture, there are unspoken commandments. Some of which include:  

1. Honor thy lease and thy landlord. 

2. Thou shall not use bleach in the communal washers. 

3. Thou shall not stay put for more than five years.  

By first grade, my friends’ mothers found new boyfriends to live with, new jobs, or were lucky enough to move into a bigger home. My parents and I stayed. The population of kids in the courtyard dwindled away. The heather regrew. I began to make friends in school and was introduced to new habitats. Some had driveways, others had backyards. But I did not feel too alien in species, as the ecosystems were not too dissimilar in state from my own. I would spot a ladybug once-in-a-while. The windows also wept. 

¨¨¨¨ 

If A Sparrow frames grief and mortality through the celebration of the mundane. Maggi’s poems personify the earth as a wise friend; someone that encourages her to pair nature with her navigation of growth and pain. Petticoats of snow, freckles of mold, and the wide-mouthed sky accompany her through a season of physical and emotional change.  

I consider myself a humble bystander to most author’s lives, but each time I read If A Sparrow, Maggi takes my hand and invites me into the intimate vignettes of her life. I sit with her in the doctor’s office as she is diagnosed with MS. When she asks the impatient doctor for a little compassion, he looks “down at his shoes to change his world.” On a particularly snowy winter break, her son visits. I watch them from the living room as they play Parcheesi and eat pie. I tag along to Orchard Park Assisted Living, where Maggi imagines her father as the “young vet bound for California, / his voice a bright sky without wind or clouds.” On Valentine’s Day, as I complain about lacking a lover of my own, she reassures me that love is not dead—she watched a young man walk across campus with a bouquet of flowers. She tells me of a moose sighting and why rolled oats deserve their own ode. 

If the topsoil of Maggi’s life holds the treasures of mundane, she dares to weed. She digs up the roots of her cynicism and fears, bathing them in warm water to prove that at their core, they are not as daunting and wild as the dirt would make them seem. “Temporary shape of light, set on leaving, / how am I to carry my own spark / and keep it lit without burning my hand?” 
  

¨¨¨¨ 

I was wriggling larvae in high school. Four combined grade school districts meant a rush of new organisms symbiotic to, and in competition with, my own life cycle. My environment grew. Friends’ homes now had garages, acreage, pantries. Grass separated them from their neighbors. They knew little of condensation. For the first time in my life, I noticed tiny welts on my arms and legs left by the ladybugs who, at night, gnawed at my flesh. This was not luck.  

I grew too spiteful to bring the ladybugs outside. Their shells withered into crisp fossils. Accidently stepping on one felt like a tiny pebble; red and black massacres stuck to my heel.  

Through the four years of high school, I used the condo commandments as excuses to protect my enclosure. “Sorry, thou shall not violate quiet hours.” Friends eventually stopped asking. Only few bore witness to the ladybug infestation.  

The night before moving to college, my friends paid me a surprise visit. All six of them were standing on my unit’s front step, plus two mutual friends who had never seen where I lived. I had my insecurities, but it was a hot August night that felt so momentous and so full of love that I didn’t care. As we laughed and stalled to part ways, my next-door neighbor opened his front door. 

“Are you almost done?” It wasn’t a question. “You’re obnoxious. It is 10pm—other people live here too, you know.”  

I, who had grown in the condo from an egg to larvae, knew. We apologized. Through hushed goodbyes my friends left. In the morning, I left the ladybug carcasses on the windowsill. 

¨¨¨¨ 

In November of 1887, John Keats wrote a letter to his close friend Benjamin Bailey, urging him to focus on the beauty and joys of life despite its numerous hardships. He wrote: “I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour—nothing startles me beyond the Moment. The setting Sun will always set me to rights—or if a Sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” Maggi responds to this quote in If A Sparrow’s eponymous poem: 

My own small joys hop like 

the robins flown to watch from my fence tops  

as I root around the garden edges  

for signs of living parsley or violets. 

I won’t eat worms, but they’ll eat me someday; 

in this Spring hour of Winter, bird-eyed, 

I peer into the old year’s exposed grass 

to find a future writhing up at a light. 

¨¨¨¨ 

My first year of college, I was a thrashing pupa, hot with the anxieties of change. In the fall, I was so lonely I called my ex-boyfriend weekly until he told me to stop. I died my hair. I ate breakfasts of SSRIs; dinners of tangerines and Newports. I did anything I could to create a false sense of self that did not have an infestation of bitterness. By the spring, I had nearly squished myself. I decided to rearrange all the furniture in my dorm room instead. I moved the dresser to find a mass grave of speckled reds and yellows clumped among lint. The ladybugs had followed me three hundred and fifty-four miles away. 

I think it was a sign that I found If A Sparrow not long after this. Wandering aimlessly around a used bookstore, Maggi’s poetry collection sat perched in the local author section. Three dollars, no tax, final sale. I found comfort in the familiarity of setting and vulnerability. Maggi did not let the bitterness of circumstance consume her and pushed me to do the same. She showed me the value of perspective, and that there is no such thing as “false importance.” 

I recently traveled back to the bottom of the hill. I drove through the Cascade’s awakening spring, listening to a mixtape my partner had burned for my journey. I think he noticed my anxieties before I left, because in one of the track lists accompanying the CD, he wrote, “Notice the dew laden grass. The breeze on your face. All is calm and well, a gift from the earth to your soul. In turn, all your actions, no matter how small, pay homage to the great green and blue marble that birthed you.” When I arrived home, the windowsill was bare. 

Two bodies intertwined in sleep soften into too-ripe fruit. Wrinkles and stretch marks resemble the barks of a tree. Grief is a porch swing. A ladybug is optimism, a robin joy, and a sparrow a testament to the earth that lives beyond us. Maria Theresa Maggi had it right. 

I feel myself nearing the adult stage of my metamorphosis. I will soon leave my chrysalis and flit to a new ecosystem. Though I’ve moved dorms each year, the ladybugs have followed. I presume they always will. I’m back to believing they are a good omen. I let them skitter on my palm before releasing them to the wind.