I think I sometimes use the possessive to stave off considerations of mortality and not only to register affection, but that said, ‘our’ two fall and winter crows have become five, and when they visit the feeders, the three young look sleek as racing cars and walk, hop and sit as near their parents as they can.
Young mourning doves, still slim as models, visit and nuthatches and the Cooper when I am not looking, whose presence announces itself in gobs of feathers.
Our second brood of house finches is in the baseball cap suspended on the front porch. The mates rush back and forth all day feeding. Their first brood fluttered about like slow motion balloons losing their air once they had left their nest.
Covies of bluebirds and wrens should soon be emerging from boxes far apart from each other at the edges of our fence line.
Patti’s garden is filled with color and with bees and wasps and beetles of every kind.
I can sit beneath the Japanese maple and hear bird songs at any time of day.
But I have also been looking at the skies even more than I do for I have not seen vultures in weeks. Their numbers disappeared, as if they had dropped off the edge of the horizon, and this during afternoons of luxuriant thermals rising off cut fields. I do not remember a similar space of time like this, ever. Audubon messaged us and reported that this is their breeding time and they become secretive. Still, I have darker suspicions. I watch the skies in a kind of mourning. I listen to the neighbor’s gunshots with a sick, useless anger.
I do not remember a time when dread shadowed me (shadowed us), in so compelling a manner, when its proximity to everyday life and routine and the innocuous passage of thought was so omnipresent. It feels as if we are holding our collective breath and waiting for the announcement that will be the most awful of these last 43 months. I think a state of mourning is the new normal, the empty skies an augury of more sorrow to come.
