Mourning dove

Mourning doves matter to Yolandi Von Riesen as both living birds and a sound threaded through her memories. Hearing them in the early morning recalls childhood on the prairies, when waking meant having nothing to do but play; learning that people are now shooting and eating them makes that remembered world feel newly vulnerable.

A sound of childhood

Yolandi likes to listen to mourning doves when she wakes early. Their calls bring back her and her sister Elfrieda Von Riesen’s childhood and the prairies, and stir sadness, happiness, and nostalgia together. The birds’ song is attached to a freedom she remembers as a child: waking with the day open and nothing required but play.

Music and the passage of time

The doves also belong to the soundtrack of Yolandi’s youth. She remembers being fifteen, waking to their song and The Clash, and describes that conjunction as a feeling of being in heaven. The memory sets a natural sound beside music that marked her adolescence, making both part of an intimate record of what childhood once felt like.

Threat and loss

When Yolandi hears that mourning doves are being shot and eaten, the news strikes her much as hearing that Joe Strummer has died. The comparison places the birds’ physical vulnerability alongside the loss of a formative musical figure. Their disappearance from the remembered landscape becomes a way for Yolandi to register how much of childhood seems to have passed, and to wonder who remains to lead people out of the wilderness.