The two of us, my husband and I, took our breakfast toast, melon, and coffee out to the porch last Sunday morning, with late summer hanging on by its teeth. It was early, so the neighbors’ ACs were still off, and nobody was out yet. “It’s so quiet,” my husband said.
Traffic out on Charles Street was a quiet hum; the lady across the street, sounding like a Marine commander trying to be polite, called to her kids, “Are we doing this? Or not?”; the late-summer’s heat bugs were sawing up and down; the goldfinches asked each other questions and answered with more questions; and a catbird was squalling at the sparrows in its wholly-owned lilac bush. “It’s so noisy,” my husband said.
Mainly it was the hummingbirds. They make little cherk noises, they roar around, they vroom. They hover in the light, their wings backlit and translucent, like tiny angels.
We’d hung a hummingbird feeder across the porch from the goldfinch feeder. Goldfinches fly to and from the feeder in looping catenaries. Hummingbirds don’t fly in, they apparently have warp drive – they simply appear out of thin air, feed, and disappear. Sometimes one changes places on the feeder by lifting straight up, backing up, moving sideways, landing, feeding again, lifting straight up again and then plinking right out of space-time. They’re just so enchanting. Continue reading
When I was six I had my very own windmill. At least that’s what my dad told me. We were driving to camp through Altamont Pass, which held one of the first wind farms in the country. He squinted up at the golden hills and pointed. “There,” he said. “That’s the one.”
