Take the outside and bring it in

The storm took forever blowing in. The trees danced endlessly, swaying to the left and right and shaking their hands in the air. They would have been the kind of trees that loved the music played by a weekend DJ at a distant cousin’s wedding. Music reminiscent of junior high school dances where the newly tall boys tried to grate their hips against the newly pretty girls.

Grey dough rolled across the sky. It raised and sank intermittently and sometimes tried on new textures. First like a bag of cotton balls all stuck together, then like connective tissue peeling away from the bone.

The birds huddled and puffed their feathers. They endured the storm in monogamous pairs, resting their heads and bodies together.

My grandmother had been an avid birdwatcher. Her favorite memories, she had told me once, were of her skulking through private forests by herself. "Attentive, my dear, you have to be attentive," she advised. "We are clumsy creatures. We make ripples, wakes and tears wherever we go."

She encouraged me to be more like a bird. I never really understood what that meant or if it was a good thing. To be more like a bird.

The windows of your friend’s house in Italy were riddle with greasy imprints of feathers in the shapes of birds. We found a dead one on the balcony after a loud bang had startled the house into looking for robbers.

I cried when I picked it up because it seemed to light, like air stuffed in a veil. I wanted it to be heavy, a solid piece of rubber struggling to stay out of the trash. But it felt like nothing and the only thing that moved was it neck, bowing low off the dustpan before it slipped off amid the garlic skins and coffee grounds.

Everywhere we went, animals traveled in groups: two muddy dogs with Collie faces trotted down the side of the road, four German shepards curled like conch shells in the nadavitsdivets made by the gnarllous roots of the umbrella pine, the mismatched team navigated the scooter-ridden streets of Naples and slept in the park at Piazza Cavour, near the Archeological Museum.

We saw some solitary animals. One dog rested in the gutter with its back against the curb. Its head followed the movement of cars slowly.

"“He's been in the same place for days,"” you shook your head and made that face, the one that was all twisted lips and worry where your eyes should have been.