Along Engle Creek the birds were singing so loud and in such numbers all I could do was pause, look up and listen. High up above the ruckus a skein of geese stitched the dark clouds. The leaves are playing opposite of the birds: abandoning the trees in showers of color, silently gliding toward earth. What happens every year is happening again, on schedule and, yes, as expected. Everything in the background overrides this expected time and mutes the sounds and the colors: the added noise of the pandemic, the never-ending election cacophony. It’s like a soundtrack you don’t really notice until you see a replay without the music. Or, until something spectacular overrides it: birds, leaves, the way the sun catches the now bare tree behind my house where a lone cardinal rocks slowly in the breeze. I would have missed her completely if Ursula and I hadn’t been watching sparrows at the feeder and she rose out of the leaf scatter. A small grace blessing the branch.
Small graces take us from moment to moment. Beauty walks with us in flashes of color, the play of light, the music of limbs strummed by a breeze, even the unique scent signatures of each season.
ReplyDeleteYou have the red cardinals and we have the blue scrub Jay's. Bits of bright color as the monochrome of winter quietens the landscape.