May 13, 2013
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Birdwork
Spring should be along now any time. Even in Michigan. It is a bright, sunny day today. According to the back fence it is about 57 degrees out there, which is warmer than the forecast predicted. Both dogs are in the house this afternoon, although they come and go. Like the pots, which were recently de-shedded in preparation for the chickens, we are all waiting for the frost date.
Ilah announced this morning that she’s been seeing white ‘snow’ falling all morning. I suggested they might be petals from the ornamental pear, and she agreed they were petals: the ornamental pear, however, is naked of blooms and has been since Saturday. And she outlined all of the blooming white trees in the surrounding neighborhood, calculated against wind velocity and distance, and it appears there is no apparent source for these petals that are still falling down upon us. I guess we’ll have to move.
I shouldn’t be sarcastic. I try not to be. I don’t know where the petals are coming from either, I just chose not to worry about it. It’s a little like the bird feeder we hung at her window. We discussed it. We talked about the price of bird feed versus the invasion of the grackles, which stopped our bird feeding activities years ago… I bought a sock of finch feed on sale and brought it home, Nancy hung it, and we said, “There–something for her to look at when the word-search puzzles get too boring.”
She called me a few days ago. Hurry, hurry, come. Oh, sorry–it’s gone. And she pointed at the feed sock. There is a bird who comes to see her but she can’t tell what bird it is because it comes around 4:30 and lands in the shadows and she can’t see it clearly enough to know what it is. So now we have the continuing mystery of the Phantom PM Bird. It has a schedule but no identity. If she gets up out of her self-ejecting chair and races out to get one of us on her walker, the bird flies away.
It’s “dark”.
There is some sort of ever-darkening birdwork going on here.
I ask myself, just how much effort does it take for you to stand up, walk to her bedroom and look through the window at her bird feeder–which you bought, by the way, and made your partner hang for her mother’s amusement. Is that really too much to ask? Really? You gave it to her: why wouldn’t she assume you’re interested in birds?
I think it’s a house finch. Which I have said. There are enough of them around here. The bird book describes them as ‘sparrows dipped in strawberry sauce’. They can appear ‘dark’.
But we don’t know for sure. Just like we don’t know where the white petals are falling from.
And I think to myself, Maybe you should leave that bed room once in a while. Try sitting on the porch. But then, the porch is cold for me, and I can’t tolerate the tropical sauna that doubles as her bed room.
From the porch she could keep better watch on the people in the brown house across the street.
The people in the brown house across the street are not the same people who lived in the brown house across the street when she came here in late January. ”They moved,” she tells me. It’s clear she wonders where I’ve been.
I don’t care. I’d never met the people who had just moved in when she came. The only reason I knew the people who lived there for 2 1/2 years before that was because their dog periodically went on a walkabout. Her name was Chloe. She was a beautiful blue pit bull. She nearly stopped my heart cold the first time I met her: I was walking Riley on his leash and I heard toenails on the pavement, turned, and this rock-jawed, muscled gladiator was trotting up to greet us… She out-weighed my dog by 20-30 pounds, and he’s a lover, not a fighter.
Hi, hi hi, Riley said.
Hi, hi, hi, Chloe said. You live here, don’t you–I live across the street…
I‘m walking my woman right now, Riley said, I have two of them. They put me on a string and I drag them around the block.
Cool, Chloe said, I think I’ll sniff her. Hey, she smells good. See you around….
Chloe taught me to temper assumptions about appearance with a little reality. Once again.
The wind is blowing outside the Conservatory window. It seems oddly quiet, since the windows are all closed because it’s colder than it looks out there. All manner of tiny leaves and petals and organic matter is fluttering by in the wind. Dandelion seeds, for instance.
I could get in the car and drive around the neighborhood, looking for shedding white trees.
I could lobby to keep the chickens in the pachysandra patch between Ilah’s bedroom window and the neighbor’s fence. She could watch the hens all day. They’re bigger than house finches, and we could control their schedule. She could keep track of where they lay their eggs. She could come flying out of her room on her walker whenever the dogs start barking at the chickens.
There are four of them. The chickens. Or, there will be four of them. They haven’t come to live with us, yet. Nancy’s son is brooding them while we figure out how to build a chicken house from a shed, a backyard, a garden, two dogs and and Nancy’s mother’s word search schedule.
Chickens are, oddly enough, the only creature I know intimately from infancy to plate, including that difficult and unpleasant transition from living to dead, plucked, cleaned, and cooked. All of the women responsible for my continued existence at one time or another raised and killed their own chickens. Now my partner wants to try. Every time I think of it, my mind shifted immediately to the over-sized raccoon living on the stairs in Gray Gardens.
Yeah, those old women were characters all right.
We found all three of them–and two dogs–buried under these piles of white blossom petals. We have NO idea where those petals came from…
