Calling the Birds Home

A profoundly intimate portrait of love and loss — a daughter’s luminous dialogue with her mother as memory fades but tenderness endures.

Calling the Birds Home by Cheryle St. Onge is an intimate meditation on memory, nature, and loss. Born from the experience of her mother’s illness and death, the work delicately traces the shifting roles of mother and daughter, transforming the act of caregiving into a poetic dialogue with the landscape. Through luminous, contemplative photographs, St. Onge captures the rhythms of waiting, the textures of daily life, and the fleeting presence of light and nature as signs of continuity. Her writing and images move between fragility and resilience, evoking how love and grief shape our perception of the world. Designed by Teresa Piardi (Maxwell Studio) and published by L’Artiere, the book is both elegy and renewal—a tender testament to the enduring ties between generations and the quiet power of photography to keep what is gone within reach.