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The 13 Ways Of Crow (In Honor Of Wallace Stevens)

1. They have two juveniles that follow too close, feathers puffing, wings in flurry, beaks open, loud in their demand to feed. To be fed. But it is too late for that, they are out of the nest. It is time for them to feed themselves.

This September my children will both be in middle school. A teaching has begun. I no longer need to pack their lunches or do their laundry. I still need to drive them to school and be familiar with all of their friends. We are balanced for a year or three between, like the crow child on its branch.

2. The word crow comes from the Old English crawe, an example of onomatopoeia, a word formed by sound. These words hold an ancient texture. Which ancestor listened? Which ancestor named the crow by its voice alone?

3. The American Crow is who we see outside our windows in the Pacific Northwest, but in Norway, home of my grandfather Sigurd, our cousins look out on the Hooded Crow. Both the American Crow and the Hooded Crow have wide ranging distribution. There are other species and subspecies of crows all over the world, ranging in shape and size: jackdaws, Jungle Crows.

4. My grandfather Sigurd is a crow. It’s a long story, too long for this essay. In short form: my grandfather died during finals week in my last year of college. For days before, and weeks after, a crow visited me—just one. Haunted me, more like. Do you know the poem:

One crow, sorrow.

Two crows, joy?

Everywhere I looked, one crow. Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.

Finally I had the wherewithal to dig in the stacks of the SOU library, where I found a dictionary of symbols. The crow is everywhere in human myth, as widespread as it is in life. It is some places a trickster, others a shapeshifter. In Norse mythology the crow is one of the many forms of the famous slayer of Fafnir, whose name is Sigurd.

Even now when my children see a crow they say: Hi Great-Grandpa Rosenlund.   

Crows in the wild live only a few years, but the oldest crow in captivity was in its fifties when it died.

5. Crows are considered to be one of the most intelligent animals, capable of making, not just using, tools. They have a brain to body mass ratio on par with some apes. One of the hallmarks of intellect is memory, another is curiosity, and crows have demonstrated both in abundance during repeated experiments.

6. Valkyries and the Morrigan, female warrior goddesses who preside over the battlefield in both Nordic and Irish myth, both are symbolized by crows.

7. One of the first long books I read to my two-year-old son was Crow and Weasel by Barry Lopez.

8. This year I spent nine months homeschooling my son, who is now thirteen. Every day we would take a walk together as part of the PE protocol, and that’s when we first saw the albino crow. Its beauty is hard to describe, like seeing the form of something in negative, like color that isn’t color. Each day we sought the albino crow, it became a talisman, a reminder: look out, look up, wonder is everywhere. Magic is real.

9. Crows in the wild live only a few years, but the oldest crow in captivity was in its fifties when it died.

10. To dream of a crow may mean loss, change, death, destruction, failure, adultery, fear, bad news, sad events, mysteries or witchcraft. At least according to a survey of dream websites.

11. In the years since my grandfather’s death I’ve come to experience crow as a guardian. See that mass of crows rising up by the river? That’s where the eagle lives. When threatened they come together, defend each other from the raptor with the power of their mass.

12. The crow couple outside my window is patient with their young, firm and protective. Crows don’t push their offspring out of the nest. Some crows stay with their parents for years. But there seems to be a lot of variation in whether crows stick together with their families, or find their flock (their murder) elsewhere.

13. Maybe it was this year of homeschooling, but I can see something in the future that I have not ever noticed before: my children will become self-sufficient. They will learn to do all of the things I have done for them. And when ready, they will fly.

Lara Vesta is an artist and writer living along the Willamette River south of Portland. You can find her work at www.laravesta.com.

Resources

The Family Lives of the Uncommon American Crow
by Kevin McGowan

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/planta.htm

A Thought Experiment on the Intelligence of Crows
by Joshua Klein

http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_

intelligence_of_crows