waterspider.net
Wings and things

The planets must be doing something because it's been one hell of a weird day so far. I'm so wired from the bedlam, I'm having half a beer to calm my nerves instead of eating lunch. Who can eat under this kind of stress? The hell of it is, it's too boring to make good content unless you know the players involved, and only Karen will appreciate the details.

So while I'm taking a breath here, let me tell you about my bird moment last evening. My long time readers know that I'm always having these odd bird experiences. I was coming out of City right at sunset, having gone back to deliver a copy of an old newspaper to the construction guys who are tearing down the old state hospital building. They're at City Tully O'Reilly's every Wednesday for some reason. We don't usually exchange more than the usual pleasantries but they were really hot to get this issue of the local paper for the kids back home I guess, so I made a special trip over to give it to them and of course they insisted on buying me another beer.

So I was a little more buzzed than usual when I crossed the street and maybe that's why I noticed the wren party going on between the tree and the ivy on the side of the rooming house on Pleasant Street. The din was almost deafening, and it wasn't the usual chirping those birds make, it was more like a drunken bird brawl.

There appeared to be hundreds of them, continuously moving from inside the ivy to the tree, to the roof and back again. They would hover outside the vines covering the wall, flapping their little wings so fast they could have been giant humming birds. The wall and indeed the very air was alive with little brown wrens and above it all, platoons of swallows cut through the sky with the their sharply curved little wings.

I stood there watching so long that the passers-by probably thought I was one of the nutty people who live in that building but eventually, Stacy stopped and watched with me for a while. It makes it more respectable somehow, when there's two. We couldn't come to a consensus as to why they were so agitated but we agreed that there had to be a hundred little wren homes in that quivering greenery. I stayed for a while longer even after she went on her way.

Oddly, it was the swallows that followed me home.