For my neighbor Linda back in Lincoln, Nebraska, it was chickens—fridge magnets, figurines, calendars, coffee mugs, decorative plates. To sit in her kitchen, some sunlit morning, was to be surrounded by feathers and beaks in all manner of design. She just loved them.
She couldn’t say why. For someone else, it might be bumper stickers. You slap one down, then another, then pretty soon the entire back of your car has been plastered over with slogans and jokes, the oldest of which start to fade and peel off.
I’ve never been an obsessive collector of objects—I don’t like clutter. I collect endings to essays I want to write. The ones I like give me something to write toward, a sense of purpose.
Just about anything will do, but I am particularly drawn to reversals of fortune, epiphanies, ironies, rhyming action, concrete images coded symbolic. A few years ago, at dusk, I saw an owl swoop into a low branch and start poking its beak into a catbird’s nest. The catbirds inside made a terrible hissing-screeching-gargling sound—like a baby that’s been scalded—and after a moment the owl, for whatever reason, decided it was too much and flew off.
After the danger passed, dusk shifted to dark. The night deepened. It struck me that the owl could come back at any moment, and that the catbirds, whose cheery songs I loved and had been listening to all afternoon, lived under perpetual threat.
While I didn’t know what story from my life the moment might make a good ending for,.