THE TREE OF HEAVEN

By Gail Goldberger

The fall of 1983 is a fall I will never forget.  A long siege of what felt like the flu felled me from August into September.  After five weeks of feeling sick, of returning to work again and again only to end up back home in bed, I insisted that my health maintenance organization give me blood tests to determine if I had more than the flu.

Sometime in mid-September, my doctor called me.  “No wonder you’ve been so sick,” he said.  “You have a form of mononucleosis.  You stay home now, and stay in bed.”

Relieved and yet not, I gave in to my diagnosis and spent most of the fall and early winter at home in a horizontal position.  It was really no fun.  I lived in a walkup on the third floor.  Just going down to get the mail exhausted me.  I couldn't make it to the end of the block without collapsing in the grass.  Friends had to help me grocery shop.

One afternoon, early in this siege, I was lying in bed and had opened my back door for fresh air.  Toward late afternoon, I heard a lot of bird song coming from out back.  There was a tree of heaven out my back porch, the top of the tree smack up against the porch railing, and the tree shook with bird song.  I had never heard these sounds coming from this tree before.

Curious, I pushed my screen door open and looked at the tree of heaven.  Flitting about in the leaves were small, bright points of color—yellow, orange, green—some with streaked wings.  I didn’t know what I was seeing.  I hurried, as much as I could hurry, and grabbed my field guide and my binoculars so I could figure out what I was seeing. 

As quietly as I could, I pushed the screen door back open and sat on the door stoop, which nicely accommodated my book, my binoculars and me.  Happily for me, they had decided to spend more than a minute or two in this tree.  I fixed my binoculars on the birds and saw that they were small, streaked, colorful and vocal.

I flipped through my guide.  Could these be warblers?   I took note of each one—the green, a black-throated green warbler, the orange and black, an American redstart, the yellow, a Wilson’s warbler.  I wondered why I had never seen these before.  It was the 26th of September.

I looked to my guide.  They were migrating!  This was really exciting.  In the midst of my hideous sickness I had a full 10 minutes of joy.  I listened and looked at birds never seen before.   and felt the universe had opened up and spilled happiness onto me, that all was not lost, and that life would go on, as surely as warblers return to their wintering grounds.