Song of the Mockingbird: My Journey with Josefina

The late afternoon sun is huge in a sky so blue it almost hurts. The air is cool, but I can still feel the day’s heat rising off the rocks. As we walk, Dad calls out the plants he sees: sage, Indian paintbrush, and piñón trees. Daisy bounds ahead of us happily.

Then a mule deer bounds across the path in front of us. I grab Dad’s hand, and in a flash, it’s gone. Dad and I both grin. That’s something we’d never see in Chicago.

My scowl returns. Dad breaks the silence to say he and Mom know how much I miss Chicago, and admits they miss it too. But they’ve been trying to embrace New Mexico, and they hope I will, too. I just nod.

When we reach the rocky hills at the end of the path, Daisy scrambles up some boulders and noses around the openings between them. I point to a large opening that looks like a cave. Dad climbs up, peers in, and agrees, we should look together. Inside, it’s cool and dark. Dad holds up his keychain flashlight, revealing a rough rock floor and sloping walls that extend about ten feet back, the ceiling solid stone. Daisy slips inside, and Dad raises his hand to help me in.

I take Dad up on the offer, a little excitement bubbling up, and peer out at him. I feel like I’ve entered a separate world, dark, cold, and alien. The high desert seems miles away.

Dad hands me his flashlight and I scan the walls. Daisy noses under a pile of stones by the rear wall, digging, then backs up and barks once. Dad warns it could be a snake. I bend over and shine the flashlight into the stones. There’s no snake, but one rock is shaped oddly. I get closer and realize it’s a clay object, shaped like a bird.

I pick it up. It’s about the size of my hand, hollow, with traces of yellow paint glowing in the dimness. There’s a hole at the end of the bird’s tail, another at its mouth, and a few small holes along its back. It’s a little flute.

I clutch it tightly and follow Daisy out into the open. In the sunlight, Dad and I examine the flute. He guesses it’s from the early nineteenth century, handmade for casual use. As a professor of Southwestern art, he’s familiar with things like this, and says being hidden from sun and moisture has kept it in great shape.

We start back to the house, the bird in my hands. Through the window, I see Mom and Henry in the kitchen. Mom picks Henry up from school on her way from the health center, where she works as a social worker.

Not eager to listen to Henry rave again about how cool it is here, I tell Dad I’m going to stay outside for a while. I take a seat on a big boulder behind the house. Dad nods and says we can show Mom and Henry the flute at dinner.