“This afternoon is for the birds,” Sarah thought. And then she smiled. She felt that, because she hadn’t been smiling much lately. She paid a little attention.

She was looking at her yard, noting the lively population of dark-headed little flyers amid the yarrow, two robins standing at the ends of the garden like sentinels, a solo hummingbird popping in and out of the salvia blooms. It was 2 p.m. and the creatures were acting dawn-hungry. They looked healthy, happy.

She wondered how “for the birds” came to mean something worthless. She turned to her corner home office, woke the computer, and looked it up.

And smiled again. Apparently the phrase was American, from the WWII era, originally applied to bad army rules. It was probably taken from “shit for the birds,” referring to the avian habit of picking undigested seeds and grain out of horse droppings.

Sarah already knew about that line of bird food. She has a tenacious memory about things that interest her, and facts that create perspective always interest her. She’d heard long ago that although there was a flurry of anti-car sentiment back when the automobile was first introduced (jobs will be lost, the economy will be hurt), in the end, only one form of life-as-we-know-it was extinguished by the advent of car culture: a few types of small birds, who got through the winter by gleaning edibles from warm horse manure. Those must have been the very birds, on their last legs (wings), who contributed to the creation of the “for the birds” idiom.

She felt cheered. She is a normally sanguine individual, but lately she’s been tamped down. Unmotivated. She’s been thinking that this persistent dullness and sadness may be actual depression. She’s been assuming she’ll come out of it in a few days – that’s always been the case when she’s felt like this before – but the current siege has persisted for almost a month. Looking up language on her computer is the first indication that she may be mending.

Sarah has had a lucky life. She was the first-born and only daughter of a strong marriage, and her brothers, kids, and most cousins are still alive. She married twice, somewhat casually, and both divorces were amicable. She likes to live alone.

She was always attractive enough. She was always plenty smart. She’s had no trouble earning a comfortable living as a benefits consultant.

So maybe it isn’t surprising – the way the deaths of two exes hit her. But she and her friends were surprised.

Philip went first. He passed away two years earlier, from rampant cancer that began in his left big toe. At that point Sarah hadn’t seen him for over a decade. He’d been what she described as an insignificant other, during most of her 40s. He was the relationship that occurred after her divorces. There’d been an initial frisson of attraction for her, followed by some seriously good kissing and then unimaginative sex. She had ditched the physical side of their friendship soon after. But Philip was tenacious to the point of being a pest, and she enjoyed talking and camping with him, so they continued to spend time together for six years. That included some terrific camping experiences: a week at 10,000 feet, above the tree line, alone with alpine flowers and giant sky; sojourns in Death Valley before it became a national park, when it was possible to camp with freedom; a meandering road trip through swathes of extreme northern California and northwestern Nevada.

He was brilliant in geology and astronomy. He was ingenious at cards. He had brains but he also had an attention-deficient, impulsive, mumbling personality. He was a seeker after truth, but as an acolyte, always on the lookout for a teacher/guide. When he became too cultish for Sarah, and when his parenting went all-love and no-restriction, she took herself away from him and his. She couldn’t bear to watch what she was sure would be unhappy consequences. And she was correct; his older son, a pretty child of 13, drowned in the bay after going out all night with his posse.

She knew from mutual acquaintances that Philip then found a woman in his latest cult and married her. She also knew he lost that wife to cancer a few years after the wedding. She thought of sending condolences then, but stopped herself. She asked what would it lead to: seeing him? She didn’t want to see him.

She again considered communication when she first heard about his cancer. But it sounded then like he had a good prognosis. She declined to stir that pot. She was shocked when he went from good prognosis to dead, in less than a month.

That was two years ago, but Sarah notes that she often thinks about him. She told all her friends that Philip wasn’t a boyfriend, and that was true. But he was a close friend, they shared some eccentric values, and he reminded her, fondly, of other dysfunctional boys. She had been a disruptive elementary school student, bored and not able to suppress her words or facial expressions, and when she was removed from class it was always to spend time in a room down the corridor, with Keith-who-rocked and Steve-who-raged and Patrick-who-stuttered, and a few others. The detention boys were always more interesting to her than those who remained in the classroom.

She read and wrote backwards and upside down from an early age. Philip was the only person she ever met who shared the inclination. Sometimes they called one another by their reverse names: Pilihp and Haras. They appreciated the fact that his was almost a palindrome and hers suggested how she sometimes behaved.

Philip was tall and thin and grey of hair and eye. He was a stone mason and his skin seemed granite gray, as if he were covered in rock dust. He had a way of perching on a seat, long legs twisted around one another and bony visage gazing downward at her, that reminded her of a vulture. Which thought returned Sarah to the yard birds.

The little guys were still there and more abundant. She thought they were sparrows. Sparrows in the yarrow. Again she smiled. Small brown birds had joined the flock, pecking at the ground cover between the robins. Wrens? Sarah is no ornithologist but sometimes she tries to identify the flyers who visit. Once a big ring-necked pheasant spent a few minutes in her garden. She marveled at his breastiness; he looked too heavy to fly. But he hoisted himself elegantly when motivated. Recently the yard received a sharp-shinned hawk. Sarah has friends who have attended raptor courses and they advised her that the bird was probably a Cooper’s instead, but she listened to recorded calls and was sure the well-camouflaged predator was a sharp-shin. Whatever. All the small birds disappeared from the yard that day, and didn’t return for half a week.

It was Peter’s death that triggered the sadness spiral that culminated in this afternoon. Peter had been Sarah’s husband for most of her 30s and his 40s.

She hadn’t seen him in a while either. Their breakup was friendly but he was angry that she didn’t love him enough, and he wanted a clean split. She hadn’t even been sure she would hear about it if Peter died, but her former stepson, now as old as his father had been when he was with Sarah, informed her and also asked if she had any pictures of his father. Peter’s death had been sudden and unexpected – a car crash on a Friday afternoon – and Sarah’s consequent tour of the photo albums, almost as unexpected, took her down lanes of memory she hadn’t intended to tread.

If Peter were a bird, he would have posed like a penguin and acted like a hawk. He was an aggressive guy, a lawyer who had been a soldier in his youth, and his military posture, especially when he put on his tux, reminded Sarah of the Antarctic creature. But he was like a small hawk, the way he could harry and hang on.

He and Sarah had great sex and a wonderful beginning, but their years together were marbled with stress. There were memories of good travel, early days of energetic planning, recollections of kids in distress, medical emergencies, ex-spouse drama.

Now she was rocked by a strange aftermath. She had shared memories with Philip and with Peter, that were theirs alone. She’d never planned to reminisce with either man. She hadn’t expected to see them. But she’d been carrying with her the idea that when Philip remembered Humphrey’s Basin, when Peter revisited Jamaica in his mind, Sarah was a figure in their heads. Suddenly that wasn’t the case. Those rooms where she might have twirled like a music box ballerina, those chambers were no more. If the memories were to persist, they’d be alone now, in her.

That seemed to impose an obligation. She felt as if she were appointed to recollect accurately: like she owed that to her dead friends.

“Funny,” she thought, now not-grinning, but she had more and better memories from times with the insignificant-other Philip than from episodes with her husband.

There was a flurry outside that caught her attention. Birds on the wing. Then Sarah saw the slower movement: the crazy neighbor lady’s deranged striped cat, belly-crawling toward the nicotiana like a soldier under fire. She was pleased to see no birds falling for the cat’s strategy.

Even so, Sarah went into the yard. She made her tread heavy, and herded the cat away.