Have You Fed the Peacocks?

On deferred desires, the peculiar economics of sick time, and the persistence of childhood dreams

This summer, I’m embracing a slower rhythm of writing, so you may notice that the free Sunday newsletter arrives a little less regularly than usual.

If you find yourself wanting a prompt in the meantime, I hope you’ll wander through the archive on our homepage, where you’ll find hundreds waiting for you, including perennial favorites like Breathe Out, Past the Break, and A Day in the Life of My Dreams.

The prophecy begins with a hyper-realistic lawn ornament.

Last week, during a short stint in the hospital for treatment complications, I started a list in my journal called “Things I Keep Wanting and Not Doing.”

The list began as a kind of anthropological exercise. Not things I’d wanted once, but things I’d been saying I wanted to do for years: get a canoe for the pond, spend more time reading in the hammock, sew the button back onto the favorite coat that has had one missing since the Biden administration.

The list grew quickly: biking along the river with my dad, walking in the woods with the dogs while listening to an audiobook, sending handwritten letters to friends, setting up my easel in the garden and painting the flowers instead of photographing them on my phone.

When I sat back and reviewed the list, I realized that proximity is a kind of camouflage, obscuring what’s right at hand. Sometimes the things we can do anytime become the things we never do at all. The unread books on our shelves somehow feel less urgent than the ones beckoning from a bookstore window. The nearby walking trail is perpetually outshone by destinations farther afield. The pond waits patiently for its canoe.

The one exception: get peacocks.

This particular longing was grander, stranger, and considerably more logistically ambitious than the others. Maybe unsurprising since it came directly from my child self.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time drawing and painting my future farm. There would be many dogs, obviously, and a rotating cast of animals acquired according to the rigorous childhood standard of: I liked them, I’d read about them in a book, or I’d seen one in a cartoon behaving in a manner wildly inconsistent with its actual temperament. There would be fruit trees and riotous flower gardens, ducks and a pony that wandered into the kitchen uninvited, enough books to require a rolling library ladder and a window seat for reading on rainy afternoons, and a few secret passages leading to hidden nooks. Questions of zoning, veterinary care, and manure management remained pleasantly vague.

Reigning over this imaginary menagerie: peacocks. They were, among other things, a deliciously satisfying subject for crayons, their tails fanning across the page in impossible blues and greens.

***

I have a habit of assigning my extracurricular dreams to a fictional future self who is less overwhelmed, more rested, and considerably better organized than I have ever been. The peacocks were firmly her responsibility.

Leukemia, however, has revised the itinerary.

I had grand summer plans: a month-long painting residency in Europe, an apprenticeship with someone I admire, and time spent resting and perhaps sketching out the early, uncertain shape of a new book. But after switching treatment plans just last month, I’m changing course yet again and beginning two new chemotherapy drugs tomorrow.

Flights canceled, regrets sent, plans undone, my world abruptly shrunk to the dimensions of home.

One of illness’s optical illusions is that an empty calendar translates into free time. This is technically true in the same way that owning a piano means you have access to music. The reality is that entire days disappear into appointments and infusions and the fog of fatigue and the administrative labor of having a body: refilling prescriptions, scheduling scans, answering messages in patient portals, waiting on hold with insurance companies, driving to appointments.

Then a good day unexpectedly appeared last week—a day when I felt surprisingly well, all things considered—and I found myself standing in it, blinking, wondering whether to garden or finally answer the backlog of emails or have a friend over for dinner.

What I did instead was spend some time reviewing my “Things I Keep Wanting and Not Doing” list. It occurred to me that if I was going to be home for the foreseeable future, perhaps this was finally the season for feathers and gloriously impractical plans.

So when Jon asked what I wanted for my birthday, I didn’t hesitate.

Peacocks, I said.

Three of them will be arriving later this month, at which point we will apparently become the sort of people who say things like, “Have you fed the peacocks?” in the same tone reserved for “Did you take out the recycling?”

In the meantime, I’ve found an ancient wire corn crib on Facebook Marketplace that we’re reconfiguring as an aviary. I have opinions about roosting bars now. Yesterday I spent forty-five minutes researching whether bachelor peacock flocks are emotionally fulfilled.

One of the stranger lessons of living with a long illness is that I’ve had to stop waiting for the circumstances of my life to become more favorable before I begin living it. I’ve had to stop waiting to feel better, or stronger, or more certain, or less busy. To stop assuming there will be a more convenient season for foraging for joy.

And so, in the spirit of summer plans, of peacocks and canoes and books waiting patiently on shelves, I leave you with this week’s guest contributor, the poet Chera Hammons, whose beautiful essay asks us to revisit the natural world and the child selves that survive us: the summer girl, the boy with pockets full of interesting river stones, the future peacock owner waiting patiently for her birds to come home.

In Community—

Save the date for our next Journaling Club: Sunday, July 26, from 1–2pm ET.

If you’re new here, Journaling Club is our monthly hour of collective creative solitude: people gathering from kitchens and couches and parked cars and garden chairs to spend a little time writing together. There are prompts, moments of reflection, and the kind of unexpected warmth that emerges when strangers show up with curiosity and their notebooks.

Paid subscribers will receive the link to join us the day before. We’d love to have you there.

Jan van Kessel the Elder, Insects and a Sprig of Rosemary (1653)

Prompt 391. The Bee that Wouldn’t Sting by Chera Hammons

When I was little, my family would spend a week every summer visiting my aunt, uncle, and cousins in the Piney Woods of East Texas. We kids roamed around largely unsupervised. We would walk to the corner store in our flipflops every day to buy Dr. Pepper and rent movies. We’d catch tadpoles and fireflies in jars to our hearts’ content. We had been taught not to talk to strangers, but there were no strangers in that small town.

I was six or seven the first time my uncle Davey presented me with what he called a white-faced bumblebee, initiating me into a tradition that went back generations. He assured me that any bee with a white square on its face wouldn’t hurt me. (I think now that it was actually a male carpenter bee.) My uncle had caught the large, gentle, clumsy bee in his cupped hands and tied a string loosely around its body, then gave me the other end of the string to hold. This became one of the things I looked forward to the most every summer. If my uncle couldn’t catch enough bees for each kid, we’d take turns with one or two. We’d follow the bees all around the yard, pretending to walk them like they were tiny dogs, or flying them like little kites. After an hour or so of this, my uncle would cut the string from around the bees, and we’d let them go.

My younger brother, after playing with these gentle Piney Woods bees, came home from one of our family trips and promptly got stung on his hand by a bumblebee. He had caught one of our local bees, not understanding that most bees will defend themselves. He ran to me in tears. That’s how I first realized that the line between safe and dangerous sometimes is very thin: a little square of white. Or how a tail moves. Or the pattern of colors on a snake. Or the words that someone chooses.

Despite all the camouflage and mimicry prevalent in nature, I have never had any difficulty recognizing danger there. Only in people. Until I married my first husband, I didn’t know that someone could be entirely different from how he presented himself. As someone with chronic illness, I have also often missed a “danger line” in myself, pushing past okay to not okay. I think that’s why so many of my poems are concerned with this line, and where, how, when, and why it is crossed. Crossing the line is irrevocable—once something has happened, nothing can change that it has happened—and it has shaped me. The scars I carry. My habits, fears, and beliefs.

Writing poems about the line helps me to understand and navigate the world I live in. It helps me soothe the wounds that are left behind. It reminds me that the people around me are all struggling with their own secret burdens as they move through this dangerous, precious, aching life.

More than anything, poetry is my way of loosening the strings that bind me to the places I never really belonged. Poetry reminds me there are some things I can never lose. No matter what else happens, part of me will always be that summer girl. Part of me will always be the girl who held tiny, living stars briefly in her hands.

This is your prompt:

Think about a surprising connection you had as a child with something in nature: maybe a beautiful tree in a park you used to visit, wildflowers growing on the shoulder of the road, a butterfly that floated around you like a song, a bird that chirped outside of your window, a wild animal you caught a glimpse of at the edge of a field, or a childhood pet. Think of the nuances of this connection. How does it still affect you today?

I’d love to hear what this prompt brought up for you. Feel free to share in the comments.

Today’s Contributor—

Chera Hammons is the author of Birds of America and a winner of the PEN Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and formerly served as writer-in-residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Pleiades, Poetry, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle and enjoys reading, birdwatching, spending time with her horses and donkeys, and caring for her houseplant collection, which is slowly but surely taking over her entire living space.