resilience

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Indira Ganesan, Two (video), 2020

There is a resilience on my balcony that is often more than I can muster.  The third set of mourning doves have hatched.  At least one chicklet has made it, and I can only guess that the other successfully broke out of its shell.  One can’t help feeling protective, worried until they  make it off the balcony, alive.

I woke from a nightmare this morning.  A young man was pushing himself into my door, demanding I write him a recommendation.  You are the best teacher of satire, it is known, he said, as I firmly tried to close the door shut.  I woke in a panic, and fed the cats.  What can it mean, that I might have written comedy instead?  Of course, I always thought I was.

This balcony continues to surprise me, quietly.  The hummingbirds continue to dive into the nectar, the birds continuew to breed.  Some bumble bees come to investigate but all I can offer them are pansies.  Their food is in the backyard, in the flowering Joe Pye’s Weed.   A jay screeches its irritation–who has wronged it now?  I feel like that jay, angry at the world , or frustrated, before its, my, voice tires.

Where will we be a year from now?  What will have changed in our daily lives? Will there really and truly be a woman in the White House who knows what an idli is, who has walked on Marina Beach?

A hummingbird comes by and dances with her tail feathers , perhaps with her reflection at my window.  Up and down she dances, having drunk from the salvia, and then she flies off to rest on a tree limb.  I watch because I wonder how long she will stay, content.  She stays for several minutes, until someone comes by, gravel crunching under their feet.

I watch the green outside my window this day in late August, wonder if we will ever get rain again? I know that soon the trees will change color and fall.  Is fall simply a word to describe the action of leaves, as spring describes the bounce of new growth?  Spring into action, then fall down? Fall down to spring up again?

Animal presence

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Dahlia Messenger from the Moon, 2017?

We had a blackout today which was explained as “ animal interference.” Had a squirrel chewed a wire, albeit a very important wire? Had a raccoon got trapped inside a transmitter, or a bird? Had a fox simply had enough, and pulled the switch?

It is kind of marvelous that an animal can control our lives. I don’t mean rats or fleas and the plague , but just a little outrage to throw us off kilter. We perhaps need a reset. A time out that isn’t pandemic-related.

The heron has reappeared.  It probably never went away, but when I do not see it in the mornings, I feel it is hiding until the tourists lessen.  This is my sense that seasons are changing, though in fact we are not at midway in this last hot month of summer.  And it has been hot, with an apalling lack of rain.  

Since March, we have been somewhat sequestered, probably less than strictly useful or healthy.   With summer tourism, coronavirus has risen as it must.  No one wears masks at the beach, which I guess is becuase of the idea that open spaces are safe.  Yet the common passageways, where strangers might pass one another are vulnerable points.  

I observe my annoyances and irritation, bury myself in books.  I have read some ninety novels in isolation, which hardly seems possible.  Somewhere thruways, detective stories set in the nineteenth century, or in the thirteenth.  As always, the hummingbirds provide diversion ad delight, and always flit away before I can reach for my camera.  

The mourning doves–have I yet said?–are once agin nesting, incubating two brand new eggs, their third brood.  This time, they too have sequestered themselves under some chairs, near a Tupperware box full of gardening tools.  I worry the space will be too small, but they must know what they are doing.

Mornings provide relief from the heat.  A change is coming, isn’t it?