This Writer’s Life—The Beauty in Incongruity

by Melissa Corliss DeLorenzo

Photo by Raj Shekhar

There’s been a pigeon in my backyard.

She has been there off and on all week, and it’s strange to see a pigeon in the backyard. Cardinals, blue jays, sparrows, robins, surely; but this little gal, she’s unusual. You expect to see pigeons on the concrete sidewalks of the city and in tarred strip mall and supermarket parking lots, but not in a suburban neighborhood backyard. Yet there she is, gray-blue and strutting. She has been pecking at the ground beneath the bird feeder we fill frequently with wild bird food from the hardware store. Being chased by the squirrels who like to eat the bird food that falls on the ground, too. We have watched the pigeon a lot—she just seems unlikely back there. Out of step? Maybe. Fascinating for sure, as out of her usual and likely environment as she is.

Here, in our little patch of green and forsythia, she is an anomaly.

My uncle died recently. He was not very old—fifty-nine—and had been sick with cancer for a few years. He’d lived out in Colorado for the last forty years of his life, but we were all still close. He was like that—distance and time ceased to matter when it came to him. He lived in the Denver area for many years but his dream was to live on the Western Slope—a vision he realized a few years before his diagnosis. He once said he imagined himself someday as the crazy eighty-five year old guy downtown with a bucket, deadheading the flowers. (He was a horticulturist. And a Deadhead.) I know, without a doubt, that had he lived into his eighties, he absolutely would have been that guy. I can easily and clearly visualize it, and that makes me smile.

It’s been rather difficult to hunker down and write this post. I keep losing my train of thought. I’m feeling rather uninspired and definitely off-kilter. It would be so easy to close the lid on this computer, give up, miss my deadline, put it off until tomorrow.

But I must write in spite of my feelings of moodiness right now—although nothing feels quite right. In spite of sadness and a sense that everything is just off, and even though I feel out of my own skin, I suppose that I must write myself back in. What can be found in these moments of incongruity? What might I elucidate from all these feelings that I can share in the form of my work? I’m not sure, but I think the work of my spirit, of my life, is to write through it all. Whether good or bad, through the tears, the frustrations, the joys. Find the meaningful convergence of the incongruous and the consistent, translate it and share it through the work.

I haven’t seen our pigeon for a few days. I keep checking for her. Maybe she’ll be back tomorrow and maybe she won’t. I feel like her presence here must have meant something or can be turned into something in a story someday. Even while I experience uncomfortable, disjointed and jumbled feelings right now, I enjoyed that little incongruous bird in my little patch of green. Be it the pigeon in my backyard or the idea of a crazy eighty-year old guy deadheading potted flowers in some downtown somewhere, it’s all just pieces of me and this world—and a little imbalance, a small bit of crookedness, the slightly skewed things cast nice angled shafts of light into the small corners of this life.

Now, off to make sense of them. Off I go to write.

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