People and pigeons are curiously much alike. That is to say the lovely birds have those qualities of fidelity, affection, and love, courage, determination, and pride which are qualities humans may boast of when they are at their best. If they display jealousy and pettishness, quarrelsome moments and gluttony they should be forgiven, for their sins are small. Indeed, we humans should be forgiven as well.
In some things they shame us, by and large. Once mated, they are wed for life unless forcibly separated. When set to the task, such as a long race, they will persevere and endure through measures of hell that only the best of men will willingly undertake.
It might be argued that they are simply, dumbly, following the programming of instinct; that they can do nothing differently. Perhaps that can be said of us as well.
I've come back to the little saltbox house on the banks of one of the many streams that once fed the Genesee, summoned again by attorneys with new offers of purchase in their pockets. This old neighborhood, once semi-rural, has been swallowed up by the city of Rochester, New York, and is no longer the locus of my childhood: is, instead, a modern banality of apartment dwellings and condominiums; even the words are insults to my memories.
I've returned with no small sense of guilt. I am the one who has left Grandpere's house to strangers these last twenty years. I'm the one who has left it vacant and abandoned to weed and rot these last five. I'm the agent of its sorry neglect and destruction.
The Victorian that once belonged to old Mrs. Chalmers, who was said to be quite dotty because of a tragic love affair and who sported a fascinating glass eye, blue and staring, acquired after a curious accident involving a hummingbird, has long since been torn down. Because she had no heirs her property was left to the state. The city of Rochester, by petition, had the dwelling declared an attractive nuisance and razed it to the ground soon after her death. My father hadn't been one of those who'd signed the necessary documents. My father respected old things. I have resisted similar petitions to flatten the saltbox for no sensible reason that I can declare. Except I, too, respect the past and those who dwelt in it.
I've long since sold off the larger house left to me by my mother and father, yet, somehow have not wanted to give up this old wreck in which I'd never actually lived but which seems to be my home more than any other that's ever sheltered me. I think I was a boy here and nowhere else, became grown-up here and nowhere else.
It sits now, deprived of its once-fashionable apron of porch that surrounded it on all four sides. A rickety makeshift of stairs and a single newel post remain where once broad steps led up to the front door. Men passing by of an evening would stop to chat with my grandfather, placing one foot on a step above the other, resting their bent arms on their legs, meaning to tarry only a little while. They often talked on till their wives or children came looking for them to bring them in to supper.
Oddly, the knee-high picket fence and gate that surrounds the front yard has been kept painted and in good repair. I wonder if the owners of the concrete-block and brick buildings on either side do at least that much to shame me-the absentee owner of the eyesore -into selling out as any decent man would do-according to their lights. I don't deny them their annoyance, even anger with me.
There seems to be no path from gate to door at first and then I notice, traced with a ghostly brush charged with shadow, the walkway worn through the grass over the years. Our marks are not so easily erased. My grandfather taught me that. I have no desire to go into the house right off, I go around the back instead.
The yard is filled with rubbish, the garage atilt and threatening to fall flat in the next high wind. I feel a stone in my chest. The land is wild and overgrown, brown and yellow in the season; the willows and cottonwoods have been cut down and uprooted; the stream is gone, its bed fashioned into a culvert lined with concrete.
I start to run down the slope, kicking the pollen of the weeds into the air, afraid, now that I'm half a century old, to recall the tenth year of my life. The loft house still stands and I run to it.
In its day the pigeon loft of Henri Baudoum was a marvel, a miniature mansion of many spindled windows, porches, gables, and carved eaves. Its roofs were tiled in dusty red shingles and the trap doors were painted a shade of blue my grandfather, whom I called Da, told me was a favorite color for such decoration back in his native Belgium. It had been, in many ways, a better house than the one in which the human owners lived.
Now it is weathered to a sad grayness, paint all peeled away, shingles missing in great patches, exposing the understructure of the roof like ribs showing through the fatal wounds in the flanks of some great beast. The dowels have been ripped from nearly every window, the traps torn away, the nest boxes inside filled with garbage. Graffiti, senseless and obscene, has been carved and painted on the walls. All is ruin.
"Oh, Da," I hear myself say, and a small wind scented with the cress and wild berries that once grew by the running stream, no longer there, rises up and chokes my heart with memory, hurting me, bringing tears to my eyes.
I am ten years old again, the cardinal year of my life, and it is a day that marks the end of my childhood.