She planted with butterflies and birds in mind. A sturdy shrub that came from a cutting of Nelson Mandela’s bush was among her most beloved possessions. She tended vegetable gardens and sweet-smelling flowering plants like roses, geraniums, lilies, among many other beauties. “After that how could I be content with one simple color?” The plant world was another great passion. As a little girl in 1938, she looked up at the night sky of Lorain, Ohio, and saw the northern lights, an event that would inspire her writing life: “I remember that most shocking, most profound event,” she said of the dazzling show in the essay The Writer Before the Page. Memories of her childhood experiences in nature made their way into her writing. The novelist, reared on the banks of Lake Erie, was a lifelong nature lover and sky-gazer. Like ghosts emerging from the river, Toni loved it best when birds visited her. Instead Toni marveled on what was happening outside her doorstep-the river, the trees, and the sublime gifts of the morning hour, which included scores of local and migrating birds. (Once I gave her Birders: The Central Park Effect, a documentary about New York City birders who go to great lengths to catch a rare sighting. While she understood the longing to see birds, efforts to time a trip for one that may or may not show up sounded too complicated for her taste. And she surely did not join birding groups. She did not go on hikes or trek to faraway places in search of exotic sightings. Yet as much as Toni revered birds, she was not a traditional birder. To my joy, I got to be a bird nerd with the celebrated author. Spiritually, the bond endures.Įvery time I visited Toni, birds somehow winged their way into our conversation, and we’d spend precious moments exchanging stories about our avian adventures. On the calendar, our friendship was fleeting. A few months later, she invited me to visit with her at her home, a magical boathouse along the Hudson River where a ghost named Beloved visited and where she wrote and dreamed until her passing one year ago. I met Toni when I interviewed her for The Pieces I Am, a film about her art and life. I had the great fortune of experiencing how she treasured them in her everyday life.
Deep readers of the visionary novelist Toni Morrison appreciate the significance of birds in her work-they show up everywhere in her illustrious canon.
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