Creative nonfiction by Daniel Younger

Teaching a crow to garden

Little bomb craters in my planter.

Soil strewn across my balcony the way children will wear ice cream on their chins and cheeks in summertime. She’s taken the spaghetti squash. Why, I wonder, would she choose the squash? I imagine for a moment that spaghetti squash is a rare delicacy — the truffles or wagyu of the crow kingdom.

Of course the answer is “why not the squash?” There is no mystery. This is the is-ness of nature . . . unhurried, unruly, un-in-need of reason.

I have known this crow for years. She nests in the hornbeam tree in my front yard. Some mornings while I drink my coffee on the balcony she’ll land on the house’s phone line and we’ll say good morning to each other. I think her name is Penelope. So when I see the seeds are gone, I feel about as bothered as when I notice my roommate has borrowed some of my girlfriend’s oat milk from the fridge. I only wish she’d waited for them to sprout, to grow. I’d have given her some of my harvest.

A strange sense of scarcity buzzes around my chest like a lazy bumblebee as I plant new seeds. I consider buying some netting, or covering the soil with an old Tupperware container . . . something to protect this batch, to let Penelope know, gently, that these ones are not hers to take. These ones are mine. Mine like the toy train I went everywhere with when I was a boy. Mine like my spot at the kitchen table that overlooks the trees and busy viaduct, where I do my work. Mine like my books or the piece of chicken on my plate Rachel takes without asking . . .

And then somehow I wake up, even though I am already awake. Before I really understand what I’m doing, and definitely before I have any reason to think it will work, I go inside and open my cupboard. I look at my mugs. I pick the red and white one with a chip on its rim. Not because it’s the one I’ll miss the least, but because the wornness of it makes me like it — the way a rumpled-looking dog somehow makes you like it more than a neatly groomed one.

I fill the mug with earth that looks like cocoa powder and chocolate bark. I gently sow the seeds — a few extras so Penelope can take them if she wants — and I set the mug on the balcony’s wooden railing between two growing continents of moss.

Penelope isn’t in her nest, so I can’t gesture to her the way I’d like to: “Here. This one is yours. This one is mine.” She wouldn’t listen to me anyway. But now, we are in on this together. I can feel it in my eyelids and hair follicles and nostrils and heartbeat and the nagging pain in my hip and my smile.

It is a practical joke of sorts, one we’ve been playing on each other ever since we were clouds of stardust roaming the cosmos.