My desk overlooks the back yard at my house. Most days I’m at my desk some time between 5:45 and 7:00 which is just in time to catch a lot of the avian life that flocks to the little woods I call my back yard.
This morning in the 4+ inch tall grass that surrounds the cover to my neighbors’ water meter which is, yes, inside my yard (don’t ask), was the dull red breast of a small robin. The bird didn’t move for a full five minutes and my first thought was that I’d be doing GRU duty before breakfast because one of the neighborhood cats killed but did not eat this robin.
Then the bird moved suddenly in that ridiculous hopping way they do when they can’t decide if they’re going to use their miracle powers of flight or not. It hopped over to the fence and flapped its wings a couple of times. Fluffy white down protruded from “underneath” the robin’s red vest at the bottom near its legs which leads me to believe that this was not a very old animal at all. It sat by the fence for a good ten minutes turning its head this way and that but mostly just staring off into some point in birdy space.
It’s an odd thing to make me happy, that I didn’t have to spend my morning with rubber gloves and a plastic bag (I know, fun for some people; for me, not so much) but more, I think, what made me happy is that nature, often so harsh, managed to surprise me not with death but with a calm individual in a species not exactly known for its attention span.