My parents built our second house from the ground up off of a street called Deer Run Lane. I can still remember the layout of that place. I can imagine entering through the mudroom, into the kitchen, then through the living room to the stairs, at the top of which was a bathroom. To the right, my parents' room. To the left, a guest bedroom and, in that corner, my second childhood bedroom. From the window in the upstairs bathroom, you could see our backyard, that expanded outward for what seemed like miles until it hit impossibly tall grass, then forest. The world was so big, and I was so small.
One of my earliest memories takes place around 2007 or 2008, in my parents' bedroom on Deer Run Lane. I with my father, investigating a mysterious sound coming from outside on an early morning in late spring. The window was open for one of the first times since last fall, so mysterious sounds like this one seemed to travel a little further and hang in the air a little heavier than what I was used to. If I stood on my tiptoes, I was just tall enough to see past the windowsill.
The sound seemed to be coming from the forest, and that was a long way for a sound to go back then. It traveled above the tall grass, over the backyard, through the fog that hung above the recently-mowed grass, dodging saplings along the way, until it finally reached my father and me. We listened. It sounded like a low whistle, eerie and soft. I had never heard anything like it before.
My father liked to teach me things, as fathers often do. He asked me if I had any idea what that sound was. I could imagine a hundred things it could be. Maybe some sort of sad creature in the woods, or maybe God, which seemed more plausible. So I asked my father if this new sound was God. He told me that God doesn't make sound.
"It's a bird. It’s called a mourning dove," my father said.
"A morning dove," I repeated.
Unbeknownst to my father, a question about this new creature stuck with me for the following couple years. Why could we hear doves named after the morning, at night? Until I knew better, I decided that wasn’t for me to know. It was a secret between morning doves and God.
