Category Archives: Birds

Bird Voices (53)

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At odd moments, I find myself missing bird sounds. Have I just become greedy? This time of year when I wake up they are not nearby. I hear bird voices, but they are coming from a distance. Right now, though, someone chirps from the Palo Verde, the high note coming through the open kitchen window and then gone. I miss the goldfinch who used to chatter in my neighbor’s yard. Once in a while a house finch comes to sing in our tree. I stop to savor it, as though I can pull those liquid notes through my skin, his song alive in me beside my beating heart. And sometimes when I wake up now to muted sounds of life I remember that first spring when we lived on Avenida Ortega. Early every morning a cacophony of bird sounds grew and swelled, like nothing I have ever known before or since. I want that again, that unbelievable crescendo. But I will remember to relish what we have here and to never overlook the music, to cherish each voice always. And I’ll work to help build more of a community here, too. (I have secret hopes the hedges in the new development will come alive with birds.) Here’s to feeling once again at the center of that symphony.

Early Morning Softness (52)

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I have to pee at 5:30 in the morning. When I come back to bed, I reach for my big chunks of citrine and chrysocolla. I lie there, rocks held in my fists, body sprawled and comfortable, soft from sleep. I feel excited and happy. Even work thoughts don’t change that. I hear a raven calling nearby and the sound of morning traffic. I hear the pwitter of dove wings in the courtyard. The doves are polishing off what is left of yesterdays seeds. I feel reassured by dreams I don’t remember, my body fed by sleep, fortified, my heart soothed without knowing why. I prop myself up in bed to write and end up staring out the window. There is a small bird bouncing on the tip of a Palo Verde branch, a goldfinch maybe, or a verdin, lost amid the yellow blossoms. I am not yet wearing my glasses. Between that and the lingering softness of sleep, the world has no hard edges. I continue to drift on fuzzy thoughts, content. Later, fully immersed in the busyness of the day, I am stopped by the moon over my shoulder when I am coming in the gate. I pause, reminded, and pull that early morning softness to me, a shawl across my shoulders.

Gray Day Gratitude (43)

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Thursday morning there is the barest touch of chill to the air. I change my T-shirt for the long-sleeved pink top Mami bought me, the one with the psychedelic swirl of words on the front that she and Auntie Gardi have, too. Mine has big holes at the wrists, and I know I will have to take it off again in less than an hour. But I slide my arms into it, loving its soft suppleness, the pleasure of the fabric covering me against the momentary cold. I am guessing this may be the last time I get to wear it. It is an odd thing, this living in the desert, this craving for cold when the rest of our hemisphere is yearning after warmth. But I am not ready for this to be the last time yet, the last time I pull on a long-sleeved top, the beginning of half a year or more of heat. I count on my fingers, eight months of it if this is truly the last cool morning. (Banish the thought.) I want to stave off summer as long as I can. I relish the cool air through the open sliding glass door. There are big dark polka dots on the pavement, evidence of an attempt to rain before I woke. I sit propped up in bed to write, cozy now in my soft pink shirt. I can smell that first rain smell, moist dirt and concrete. Black clouds hug the San Jacintos, and I hear mockingbirds in the distance, a scattered quartet. I breathe in the new rain smell and smile at our good fortune. Maybe today will be a rare gray day.

As the World Turns (41)

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yellow palo verde blossoms and buds

The mockingbirds seem to be celebrating the equinox today, marking this turning of the world. I have heard them singing day and night, more of them than I can ever remember. So, I think they must be heralding in this changing time. Yesterday I walked beside the creek bed with Audrey and Bear. I left them near the bridge and walked back along the path in the late dusk. The big frog choir starting up held all my attention, unconscious of my head cocked toward them as I walked. And I could hear a large gathering of birds beginning to roost in big bushy trees on the other side of the wash, their high-pitched calls coming across to me in waves as they settled in for the night. But when I left the path, it was the mockingbird songs that followed me home through the neighborhoods. They sang from the fan palm to the east, the telephone pole behind me. And when I was almost home a mockingbird was singing across the street in the tree whose name I do not know but whose smell takes me back to childhood. I felt the warm silky air against my calves, my face. This would be summer weather, I thought, almost anywhere else in the world. But here we have a chorus line of deep-voiced frogs and spiky ocotillos blooming red and the bursting of yellow Palo Verde blossoms everywhere you look. We have warm night air and mockingbirds singing their hearts out in the almost dark. Here we are in the throes of late, late spring. Happy vernal equinox. Happy solar new year, everyone.

Mouthful of White (35)

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I am riding home from the farmer’s market when I see a raven flying toward me with a mouthful of white. I stop to watch. He lands in a fan palm beside the bike path. I wish I had my binoculars. I want to know what he’s holding in his beak. When I first saw him, I was afraid he had a bird, but now I don’t think so. It looks like a huge clump of cotton but less dense, a shock of fluffy white against the smooth shiny black of him. I wait. I think he will put this big prize in his nest, but he only sits there. He makes those smooth guttural sounds I love so much, and another raven answers. I look over and see her sitting two trees down, matching white stuff in her mouth. On the first palm, I see a spot that juts out, and I think it might be a nest. I keep waiting. Then I realize I’ve interrupted them. I apologize and ride away. For a moment, I cry—because I am the intruder, because they are afraid of my kind. Later, I hope I didn’t dim the glory of their bright snowy find.

Coming Home (33)

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It feels good to have my notebook propped against my thighs again, my bare feet on the curved edge of the footstool. Yesterday I felt awkward, clumsy with the pen in my hand. Today it feels familiar, comforting, like finding an old sweater at the bottom of the drawer. I thought I’d given it to Revivals, I think, and pull it on against the chill of a late evening. It has been too long, it seems, too long since I felt like who I am inside it, the old friend who brings you back to center. It hasn’t been that many days since I’ve written, but the days have been long and full. Even when I wanted to write—and I wanted to, bringing my notebook out to the patio table in the mornings, moving it to the edge of the couch in the late afternoons thinking maybe I can write that evening—I didn’t find a place to fit it in. The days have been so busy it feels like months have passed instead of weeks. But I am writing now, and I realize I love the act of writing itself, moving the pen across the page. I like pausing, looking up in the middle of my dreamy thoughts. Two doves and one house finch in the big tray feeder, wary I might decide to stand up again at any moment (human that I am). Sable disappearing beneath the honeysuckle. I love the way writing makes me feel, as if putting words on the page is bringing me more fully into the world again, more a part of life in our courtyard garden. We have smog today. I can see it from where I sit, a thick veil across the mountains. I hear the noise of traffic, too. But there is the quiet pecking of the birds, the scratch of my pen, the soft sound my hand makes moving on the page. It feels good to be here writing, good to be back.

Mockingbird Layers (28)

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Yesterday morning I heard a mockingbird singing on the telephone pole outside my bedroom window. It had been singing for a while before it came to me–this was the first mockingbird song I’d heard in months. I lay in bed and let it wash through me, the pleasure and the delight and all the many layers of mockingbird meaning laid down over time. My big love brought the mockingbird to my world fourteen years ago. I still think of him sometimes when I hear one, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table in my Santa Rosa apartment on a warm summer night, the mockingbird’s song drifting in the open windows from somewhere in the nearby dark. I still have never read To Kill a Mockingbird, though I think an old tattered copy of it may still be somewhere in my closet. I have picked one up more than once through the years from one musty used bookstore or another. I think I have been both intrigued and afraid to read it. Does a mockingbird die? Last Wednesday night the Camelot Theater was showing the film with Gregory Peck. I’d hoped to ride my bike to see it and try out my new headlight, but I let my work get the best of me. Today I read in the morning paper that Harper Lee is having a second novel published in July. Now I think I must read her first one, and watch the movie, too. And if I love it, there will be a sequel waiting. I like few things better than getting to read more about characters I’ve come to love. Maybe I’ll make it another mockingbird summer.