At first I was concerned about the soil. The inspector was a tall, bespectacled gentleman who resembled Stephen King with a nifty toolbelt. We followed him around the property like little reporter mice as he listed all the reasons the purchase would be a poor decision.

The ground pitched toward the house such that water could pool and seep into the basement when it rained, he said. The soil abutting the exterior walls would sop up moisture, birth mold, rot. I winced each time Stephen King stabbed his screwdriver into the side of the house. When he was done, I sought his opinion on the overall condition. Pretty standard findings, he said. I recalled all the horror he’d raised. The crumbling roof, the mysterious pile of sawdust in the basement, the spiteful soil. We could still back out, I thought.

I could not believe it, how a house could still be a home with so much erosion. But I would learn. A house is always in the process of its own undoing.

*

Midwinter, warm somehow. My beloved and I put an offer down and won. In the lawyer’s office, I signed my name until it became illegible.

All I knew of Jersey was ash, and so, I was surprised how much I liked it. I always considered it a transitionary place, not altogether real, where I visited my brother sometimes to incinerate joss over his body. And where, during migration, we passed through, levitating on the expressway, to bird upstate. An elder birder tipped us off to warblers nesting there. We had on matching kestrel hats, which I accepted as a sign. I deemed him my future, wizened by years of migration, countless misidentifications in the field finally amounting to mastery. The house was small and green with the original hardwood floors and crown molding to die for. An enormous pin oak stood in the center of the yard. You can see it from the street, a pillar holding the sky in place, towering over the house like a parent. A life here could be a languorous one, I thought. The drive from the city was easy. Jersey’s oil refineries greeted us with billowing white plumes. They looked like cloud factories.

*

I can tell when my mother is bored of me. My slowness. The way language aches when I try to conjure vocabulary we both know I don’t have. The word for soil, nai, sounds like milk when I’m lazy. She asks me about my new yard. The quality of the soil. A future garden.

There are different laws, she considers, thinking out loud. In New York, you can plant anything. I think she is exaggerating.

I recall all that creeped out of the soil of my childhood. Our yard was a square of concrete with a strip of soil no larger than a burial plot, where my mother gardened prolifically. Winter melons and long beans swelled on vines she secured to trellises using scraps of fabric from the factory where she spent most of her daylight, fossilizing into the bent shape of devotion, rooted to a sewing machine, laboring for a paycheck with which to house us. I don’t have the words to disappoint my mother.

How to explain the drain pipes buried underground that span the length of my new yard, installed by the previous owner after a hurricane drowned it and subsequently the basement, and the complication of growing anything next to something like that, the archive of disaster. How to describe the coveted oak, located dead center in the yard, inconveniencing any blueprint for a garden. How to tell her I am leaving New York in order to leave her.

My mother speculates over my silence, advises I look into the local law. I smell the melon in a steaming, briney broth with crunchy dried shrimp and tender goji berries I can pulverize between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Long beans sautéed with supple discs of garlic, slick with oil and smoked from the wok. The image in my mind is clear, even now. My mother and her mother hunched over that strip of soil as two ancient boulders, tending to something visible only underground, or in their imaginations.

Mostly, I avoided that portion of the yard, where fleshy earthworms undrowned after storms, soil dwellers dismembered from their secret burrows. Recently, I read two theories on why earthworms do this, one being migration, the second, escape. A stunning thing about earthworms: they breathe through their skin. Moisture from rain aids with oxygen absorption, enabling faster movement above ground than below; this supports the first theory. On the second, raindrops create vibrations in the soil that mirror mole activity; to flee this illusion, earthworms rush to the surface, sometimes to their own demise. The motivations behind each theory, migration, escape, sound the same to me.

We’ll grow something, my mother says, her voice over the phone assured, as if we are and have always been one unit. Yet she knows my position, had always had an uncanny ability to see straight through me. You’re leaving us behind, she’d accused. Think about our future, she’d said. How to tell her I’m still sifting through the past. How to speak of our roots, how shallow they truly are, and always have been. How to say I no longer believe in the American Dream and all its grand illusions. Or that language can still bridge the rift between us.

Yet I find myself entertaining a funny future. I can see our backs.

My mother and I are hunched over a plot in my yard, coaxing something out of the soil.

*

Before we bought the house, we tested the walk to the train station. I teetered on the platform’s edge as my beloved inspected the ticketing machine. From down there, I could see specks of ash dispersed in the air. Turkey Vultures. I liked the way powerlines made plots of them in a graph of the sky like some alive, unsolvable equation. They floated up in a coil. Vultures are abundant in Jersey, black slits shredding open the curtain of sky. Their omnipresence means there is always cleanup to be done, the promise of renewal ever latent.

It’s called a kettle, when Turkey Vultures gather on an updraft like this, because they look like bubbles spiraling in boiling water. There are a few explanations on why Turkey Vultures form kettles, the most agreeable one being to conserve energy, allowing the air to carry them to higher elevations to locate carrion. I find birders are comfortable speculators, eager for any morsel of logic. Perhaps because birding is an exercise in obsession, and what is obsession if not the oppressive hope for narrative, for bolstering witness with reason. I make my own illusions too. To me, the vultures are convening. Solitary creatures pausing to meet their own, to remember what they are in each other, equally groundskeepers and sky searchers. Every day, I watch them drift over our new house toward some unknown end and I tell myself they are sure of where they’re headed.

Turkey Vultures were there when I looked up from my brother’s rectangle of soil, which had grown patchy after three years. My parents were busy organizing our offerings. Joss, dim sum, flowers from my mother’s garden. I distracted myself from heavy summer humidity by observing sky. Turkey Vultures brought me comfort then. The idea of a life apart from our sadness, wholly unrelated to it.

But birds don’t mean anything, really.

They may be harbingers of strange climate events, compasses that point to our betrayals to nature, but in the end, they are just birds.

*

I’ll admit it. I talk to them. The birds, I mean. And sometimes they answer.

Spring is a dramatic time for me. My friends ask me how migration is going. It’s their way of asking me how I am. They know I’m out there, taking photos with an expensive camera and a long lens, attempting to clarify a blur.

My brother passed in an April, between sunset and sunrise. That week was punctuated with cotton candy skies and new weeds snickering in the garden. I wandered around my neighborhood in Brooklyn, looking for messages concealed in the trees. I wanted to believe there were new reasons for them to be there, but no. The sparrows have always been abundant. My surviving brother, the eldest, was incensed. From California, he was a disembodied voice demanding an investigation. A report. Something in writing that revealed something definitive about how our brother had gone. At first, I endorsed this idea, of archive, of a document that could confirm if it was a mistake or on purpose. I was the youngest and still spun easily, a flimsy weather vane of a sister. The police said sorry. There is nothing to investigate. It took me a few migrations to agree. I did not need to know or understand to still be my brother’s sister.

What I did know: when it happened, it was spring, and it would be spring again, or at least some replica of it.

*

They found mold in the house. A garden of it thriving in the attic, speckled over pink insulation like some evil fairy tale storm cloud. It was our second week of homeownership and our first project of many: replacing the roof shingles. A hole had been torn open in the roof, and from where I teetered below, atop a ladder with my head floating just over the attic’s drop panel, the morning sky was dazzling. The roofer, standing next to me on the other side of the ladder, grabbed a tuft of insulation to show me the mold bound to it. It all has to come out, he said.

My allergies, I said, waving him away.

The house was built in 1930, which we knew when we decided to buy it, but now the age was beginning to feel less charming and more like a defect. In the end, the whole roof needed replacing, and bolstering, in the case of the rafters. They were pocked with nail holes from previous frugal attempts to patch the roof. They required sisters. Sister could be a verb, I’d learn. To sister a rafter effectively, one must secure a new rafter to something other than rotted wood. This made sense to me. The sister needed something strong to latch on to. This also didn’t make sense to me. The sister was supposed to be the strengthening agent.

Winter chill curled over my shoulders through my marshmallow jacket as my beloved scoped out the oak, looking for branch-candidates on which to hang a birdhouse. Shingles splintered behind me and old nails clinked onto the driveway. We would uncover the debris for months, knifed into the soil, new blades of grass obscuring the fragments. I chose to imagine spring. Warm air again. Humorous skies. Lying under the sweet shade of the oak and reacquainting myself with the earth.

*

I can see the dim twinkling geometry of my hometown from the top of our new block. It felt strange to leave the city, where I loitered for thirty years, designing escape schemes. Where, as a kid, I ate free summer lunches at public schools and was tasked with being lookout as my grandmother pilfered extra plums from the cafeteria, securing them in the leaves of her umbrella which she carried for shade from the sun. Where I watched my brother mouth a ball of soil as part of a bet; that brown clump of ecosystem from my mother’s garden in a marvelous arc, that soft, silent crumbling. Where, during pandemic days, I memorized headstones in Green-Wood Cemetery and devoted myself to birds. Where we would have interred my brother, if there were space. Instead, we deposited him in Jersey, which I was thankful for at the time, as if proximity were the sole criterion for haunting. Now he is only minutes away, waiting for me in the soil.

*

There’s an old photograph of my father, dusted in sepia, as if unearthed from a box buried in soil. In it my father is nineteen, standing shoulder to shoulder with his parents and brother like slim volumes on a library shelf before their home in Toisan. The sun twists his expression into a mean squint, transforming him into an exact replica of my brother, his future son. What I know of my parents’ lives, before: they worked with the earth. I imagine they were lives lived looking down, enriched and imprisoned by what it cared to offer them.

When my grandfather began to forget himself, my father joked about his own demise. He said it almost gleefully, as if memory were a trick we choose to believe in. My parents relocated my grandfather to their home in Coney Island, where gulls circled overhead, menacing for some easy scrap. The birds battled each other for domain atop light posts. They squabbled all day over food and pride. Gulls are surprisingly huge, stubborn birds. Once, during a drive to a beach in Cape Cod, a reprieve from an ash dispersal, I glimpsed one up close on the asphalt, its wings frozen upward in flight, its body a smear the width of a tire. My grandfather would see his own spectral reflection in the window. There is a man outside your house. He’s been waiting there all day, he’d say. He pulled down on the blinds so hard they snapped. At times, he could not remember my father, his son. I wondered what the probability was that the same disease might come for my father, and what it might take from him that he hadn’t already lost.

I agree with my father. Memories are ice floes in a warming ocean. I’m forgetful, so I write down what the birds do. What they eat. How they treat and court one another. What materials they gather to build nests and the coordinates of those nests. I freeze them in photographs so I can perceive bird time. I form connections that aren’t really there and yet my field notes are all I have. I helped dispose of my brother’s belongings. Among the short piles, I recovered my old journals, full of fragmented entries in neat, tiny cursive and others in loopy hasty scrawls where a few words consumed a whole page. They were hardly legible, these field notes of an addiction.

I’d written also of our fledgling years. Summers at full boil as our parents worked and reminded us often of their migration and its necessity and we stomped all over Brooklyn, looking for reasons to be. The sushi restaurant uptown that spiced my father’s clothes with ocean, metallic and sour-sweet, and where he labored until the sky became a hole. Loose tentacles of thread clinging to my mother at the factory where I hid behind racks of clothes and imagined I was elsewhere: in a jungle, my machete arms slicing through suit-vines, waiting for them to release my mother. My brother’s ass crack, readied behind a door, a prank he perfected and unleashed relentlessly. My brother at the pool, where I drowned during a beginner swim lesson. Him disappearing into the periphery of an advanced cohort, me gulping it all, a piss and chlorine water balloon of a girl, knowing no one has noticed me — four feet tall and frail, freedom and erasure one and the same. My mother sat with me on the bleachers, coaxed me. Who would be strong enough to protect me if not myself, she said. I understand now what she really meant. How would I protect anyone. Even then, my throat was flooded, my language, hollow and sunken deep.

*

When they tore up the old tile, they uncovered five inches of concrete in each bathroom, poured directly over the floor joists. Why? I asked. We’ll never really know, the contractor said, before she offered theories. Pouring concrete was a cheap way to bring up the floors rather than framing them. People make decisions based on what they can afford and what they can stand to risk.

They used a chipping hammer to remove the concrete. Dust from the demolition hung in the air until it finally settled over everything. I ran my finger across a cabinet shelf, drawing a long path to nowhere. I wiped away what I could see and wondered how much of it settled in unknowable crevices. The house would secretly contain the histories of its undoing and remaking forever. In the end, my allergies imploded from all the dust and I was forced outside. I gasped for air in the yard, keeling over the base of the oak like a drowning child. After they removed the concrete, we discovered the floor joists were damaged. The joists absorbed the moisture and weight from the concrete and splintered. They too required sisters. The whole house supported by siblings now, and me, waiting for them all to falter.

*

Is it too obvious to say I was not a good sister? I was the one who called 911. They cuffed him to a hospital bed as they detoxed him. Who called them? He demanded. You? Language was a worm burrowing in my stomach. I shook my head.

*

The former owner reared a monster of a dog, a German Shepherd Husky mix that scored the window trims and doors. It passed away before the house was sold to us and its hair breathed out of the baseboards like an army. At the paint counter in a Home Depot, I interrupted myself to pull its hair out of my mouth. I questioned how many strands I’d unwittingly consumed. I am becoming one with the house, I announced.

I decided we’d paint the interior ourselves to save some money. Mistakes from the previous job were everywhere, then I added my own. I lost days inside the details. Sanding, dusting, masking, my life contracted into a room, my body one giant sore thumb.

How are things, my mother asks over the phone.

There is so much work to do, I say.

Here, too.

Maan maan la.

Maan maan, she echoes.

We are quiet, and for the moment, we understand each other perfectly.

The renovations and repairs concluded a few days before the spring equinox. We moved in as soon as we could. I swept up a prodigious beard of dog hair that had accumulated in the back of the freezer. The roof yawned as it acclimated to the new season. I monitored the soil often. I located a good spot in the yard, one that received sunlight all day. We built a raised garden bed.

Here I am.

I can already taste the mountain air, feel the hike gripping my calves, see the crest of that long hill in the forest an hour north of this house, where I first heard Blue-winged Warblers shrouded in the brush, calling to each other in their coded language, a mystery I hoped to solve for a moment, before deciding it would be fine if I never did. Slowly, slowly.

Here I am, still, brother.