This morning a barred owl appeared on the wooden stake I’d put by the driveway to guide the snowplow driver. He sat there for the better part of an hour, calm as stone, eyes half-closed, unbothered by anything — the house, the cold, the fact that his perch was a piece of lumber meant for a man in a truck. He just sat. We watched from the window. Veronica and I were careful not to disturb him. Eventually the dogs went out into the yard and never even noticed him. When we looked again later, he was gone.
He’s been around our property for years. Veronica photographed him back in 2022 — perched on a wire, tucked into a pine — always with that same stillness, that same unbothered presence. He comes and goes on his own schedule. We don’t own him. We share the woods with him, and when he shows up, we pay attention.
There’s a reason every culture that ever lived close to the land assigned meaning to the owl. Wisdom. Clarity. Transition. The owl sees in the dark. The owl sits still while the world moves. The owl doesn’t chase — it waits, and when the moment comes, it acts without hesitation. If you live in the woods long enough, you stop thinking of these encounters as coincidence and start understanding them as conversation. The land talks to you if you’re quiet enough to hear it.
I needed the owl this morning.
Yesterday I made a decision I’d been circling for weeks. I took what was going to be the opening chapter of my second book — a chapter called “Caught in the Light” — and made it the final chapter of my first and only book, Surfing the Interstates. The trilogy I’d planned is done. One book. This is the book.
That meant going back through all seventeen chapters and editing carefully — tightening, cutting, making the whole thing flow as a single work rather than the first installment of something larger. It meant reading every sentence with fresh eyes, asking whether it earned its place. Some didn’t. They went.
And then came the harder cut. I’d spent two weeks recording the audiobook — five and a half hours of final recordings, chapter by chapter, the whole thing done. And it no longer matched the book. The edits I’d made to the text meant the recordings were out of date. So I deleted them. All of them. Five and a half hours, gone.
And that’s OK.
The owl doesn’t hold onto the branch it left. It doesn’t grieve the perch. It finds the next one, sits, and waits. That’s what making something real requires — the willingness to let go of finished work when the work itself has moved past it. The recordings were good. They served their purpose, which was to teach me how my voice sounds reading my own words. I’ll record again when the book is truly done. The next version will be better because this version existed first.
This is what living in the woods teaches you, if you let it. The animals don’t agonize. The barred owl doesn’t sit on that stake wondering whether the pine tree was a better perch. He’s here. He’s present. He sees what he sees. And when it’s time to go, he goes without looking back.
I’m trying to learn that. I’m seventy-four and I’m still trying to learn that. But this morning the owl came and sat outside my window for an hour while I worked, and I took it as a sign that I was on the right track. Not because I’m superstitious. Because I live here. Because attention is a form of respect, and respect is a form of love, and love is the only thing that makes any of this — the writing, the cutting, the letting go, the starting again — worth doing.
The owl is gone now. The book is almost ready. The woods are quiet. Back to work.