Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears. Here’s an example. In the first year that I really got into bird-watching, I used The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America. The book has a checklist in the back where you mark the different species you’ve seen. That many birding books have such a list tells you a lot about how people tend to approach this activity; in its most annoying form, bird-watching potentially resembles something like Pokémon GO. But this was somewhat inevitable for me as a beginner, learning to pick out discrete, individual birds. After all, when you learn a new language, you start with the nouns.

Over the years, my continued attention began to dissolve the edges of the checklist approach. I noticed that certain birds were in my neighborhood during only part of the year, like cedar waxwings and white-crowned sparrows. In the winter, my crows came by less often. Even if they stay in the same place, birds can look different not only throughout their life but during different seasons, so much so that many pages of the Sibley guide have to show different ages, as well as breeding and nonbreeding versions, of the same bird. So, there were not only birds, but there was bird time.

Then there was bird space. Magpies abounded near my parents’ house an hour south, but never here. There were mockingbirds in West Oakland but not in Grand Lake. Song sparrows had different songs in different places. The blue of scrub jays got duller as you went inland. Crows sounded different in Minneapolis. The dark-eyed juncos I saw at Stanford had brown bodies and black heads (the Oregon subgroup), but had I traveled east, I would have seen variations. Read More

“Why do you need him to be gay?”

This is how a friend (urban, liberal, male) responded when I told him I was working on a historical novel about Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Joshua Speed. The implication of his question was clear. If I was going to go there, if I was going to plant my rainbow flag on the Great Emancipator’s grave, I would have to account for my private agenda.

Now that I type it out, that phrase sounds an awful lot like “gay agenda” and peels away to reveal the same fear at its base—that our received notions about historical figures might crumble under too close an inspection. And yet, in many cases, the evidence is often hiding in plain sight. Queen Anne, as the recent movie The Favourite underscored, wrote passionate letters to the Duchess of Marlborough. Michelangelo composed love poems for his male models. King James addressed his beloved Duke of Buckingham as “my sweet child and wife,” and Shakespeare publicly directed his first 126 sonnets to a “Fair Youth,” theorized by some scholars to be Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.

Lincoln may look like he played things closer to the vest, but even his contemporaries, pondering his youthful aversion to girls, his lack of female conquests, and his relatively late marriage, struggled to come up with face-saving explanations. Judge David Davis, a friend of Lincoln’s from his circuit-riding days, insisted it was only the great man’s conscience that “kept him from seduction” and “saved many—many a woman.” William Herndon, Lincoln’s biographer and law partner, spread rumors (almost certainly unfounded) that Lincoln had caught syphilis from a girl in Beardstown, and went so far as to resurrect a long-dead New Salem maiden named Ann Rutledge, who emerged under Herndon’s burnishing as the love of Abe’s life. Read More

Norman Rockwell, The Accountant, 1924

I lost my job of fifteen years, and as I was filling out my tax return to explain this loss, I thought, Well, this was the one constant that had never changed. Taxes were always there. Every April, the forms explained what had happened to me that year, where I was living and what I was doing. There was a box for every loss and every gain, and there was a box for the things that would always remain the same. There was a record of everything.

I signed up for classes at a tax-prep company. In the first session, we went around the room to introduce ourselves. Many of the other students had been accountants in other countries, others had degrees in economics, some had MBAs or owned their own businesses. All said they didn’t know how to prepare a Canadian tax return and just wanted to learn.

The job I had before was for an investment advice publisher, where I learned that I liked numbers. I liked that the number four was always four and no one could argue with you about that. Every number had its own narrative power, even if you couldn’t see it right away. When a number changed, or when you expected it to and it didn’t change, that meant someone out there in the world had done something to make that happen. People made big decisions because of a little number. Everyone had a theory and a prediction about it. I had been an English major, but I didn’t feel out of place in the class. The theories we read and studied were really about people, and the tax return was a way of telling their stories. Read More

I’m six, speeding my Bicentennial Huffy up and down the sidewalk, or wandering the edges of a playground as the PE teacher blows the whistle through his mustache to end recess, or grinning—blonde ponytails and yarn bows—beside my mother’s maroon Monte Carlo to archive the first day of school. I’m seventeen, smoking Swisher Sweets on the lip of Johnny Roan’s truck bed, or facing off with my father’s clenched jaw after missing curfew, or touching myself to the scruff of that boy in algebra while Air Supply aches through my clock radio. I’ve been writing all of these moments as essays. As a way to reconcile the girl I used to be, the woman I am now—the longings they share. I’m in my twenties, skinny-dipping with a guitar player, or riding a teal-tired rowboat across the Rio Grande, or gripping the black receiver of a pay phone after taking the first exit to Lubbock, Texas. Or I’m older, ducking into a liquor store in Chicago, or mistaking a bearded man on a campus in New York for the one who left me years ago (calling his name, such impossibility), or driving through the yellow fields of Idaho for the first time. Or it’s a few weeks ago, and I’m standing in a cemetery telling my parents the house sold only a year after they both left me suddenly. I’m staring at the tree across the pathway and pressing my hands, hard, into the back pockets of my jeans. All of these moments feel like something I did yesterday or might do tomorrow. I remember a man who played a Dylan record in his living room. I remember climbing the rickety steps to a wooded bar in Stillwater, Oklahoma. I remember that road toward a bleached-out desert and a ghost town named Terlingua. My father and I racing popsicle sticks in the gutter after a storm. The sound of my mother’s sighs, as if she were always staring out a window. The time two friends and I got stranded on our way to a lake and spread our towels in the parking lot of a gas station so the lines of our bikinis wouldn’t miss the sun. Let me explain—in these essays, I am not a mother. It’s freeing to write a self beyond or even before I became a mother. To be ridiculous and reckless, to ride and to roam. My daughter turned seventeen last month. Give me a minute, will you? I have raised her by myself, and she’ll be leaving home in a year, so I’ve been trying to teach myself how to get back to who I was and who I am—beyond a mother—because I will be that woman soon, a woman back on her own. I need to remember how to pedal fast and wander edges and lose my clothes and cross borders and listen to records with men who still play them and listen to music by myself in the dark and take photographs of pay phones and push the gas down on roads away from ghosts until my tires kick up the gravel of a gas station. Watch her fill up, watch her pull away. Watch her answer a call from her daughter and say, “I’m fine.” Watch her mean it.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction. Her writing has been recognized by Best American Essays and appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Longreads, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine.