I turned off the lights, not wanting to wake anyone -- it was precisely 4:00 a.m. -- and then remembered to get something out of the massage room. So I turned my netbook around and used it as a flashlight. As my eyes adjusted, I found that it easily illuminated the room, with a bluish, smearing light that picked out the whites and left the darks in a grainy confusion. It seemed to me that if I were smarter, or less tired, I would understand something hugely significant implied by us all sitting so often in pools of light that we can't ordinarily see.
I slept a couple hours, spent an hour staining the back deck in my pajamas, then came here to Tom's. Forgot my glasses and had to drive back home for them, in something of a temper. Came back and settled in and finally have my coffee.
Very much a working day for me: I have a slew of gifts to enter at the Foundation, and I'm anxious to get the rest of the deck stained. The sky is looking pretty ominous again. Fortunately the two enterprises can serve as vacations from each other, they're so unlike.
A young friend of mine was deeply troubled by the assassination of a Brazilian couple, ecological activists -- I hadn't heard of them: I suspect their murder was grisly, and she was sparing me details that my aged ears were too tender to hear -- but she told me how the scarlet tanagers had arrived, as if they were messengers, such wonderful birds, coming from that part of the world! They were going to do, oh, something! in response. She'd never seen the tanagers before, and they were so amazing, and they came here after wintering in that part of the world.
Of course they were western tanagers, not scarlet -- we don't get scarlet tanagers here -- and they winter nowhere near so far south as Brazil. They are extraordinarily beautiful birds: maybe the loveliest that ever come to the Willamette Valley. I didn't say anything: I didn't see the point of damaging a healing story.
10 comments:
Huh. You've caused me to read that the western tanager has recently been classified as a cardinal, accordin' to wikipedia.
We saw that too, Bill, and we are much displeased. We gave no permission for such reclassification!
I know! Initially listening to the recording of the song it was all tanager, then bit by bit -until it was all I could hear - there was the chirrup of a cardinal.
That trill of the tanager wakes me every morning. Or does it? Would it be a tanager in RI? Maybe that's my teenagers I'm thinking of... ;)
....."staining the back deck in my pajamas"
Erm...is it just me or is there something odd about that sentence??
I dunno. Or maybe something odd about the person who wrote it?
Your would be the scarlet tanagers, Jayne: the males are a lovely red with black wings, the females olive and yellow. They're the ones that do come up from Brazil.
No, Dale, I'm the odd ine! It was pajamas and staining that got scrambled in unseemly fashion in my head.
I wouldn't have damaged a healing tale either, but I will admit to being uncharitably annoyed by those of my friends who can't help but string up magic in response to a chaotic, splendid world.
And Natalie's on to something. If I'm going to stain the back deck in my pajamas, it usually only takes a few seconds.
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