For the Birds

Storm Home

This year the early snows and freezing frost have draped the Douglas Firs outside our house in white.  The fog has not lifted for a week.  With it has come an eerie and lonely kind of silence, like the whole world is waiting, suspended, for the light and warmth to return.  I feel this way myself; encased and cold.  I am in transition, pushing forward into something that I cannot quite define the edges of.  With my cup of coffee I watch the trees, stoic and waiting.  I wonder if the thaw will ever come.  

And then the sun breaks. A flock of bright yellow birds descends, announcing their arrival in a great cacophony of song and color.  I have not seen these birds before, and it seems impossible that they are here now, covering the branches closest to the window where I sit.  They disappear before I have a chance to document them with a picture, and just as quickly the fog wraps itself back around the house.  They do this for four straight days.  And when the fog lifts, they disappear, moving on to their intended destination, the grove outside our house having simply been a refuge, a layover until the wind shifted, and they could again find their path.

I take comfort in this and imagine myself perched, waiting for the fog to lift.