Porch Guests

I'm writing this on Tuesday, which is a beautiful day thus far: comfortable, sunny, a bit breezy. I'm dying to go out on the back porch and sit at my space on the picnic table and write or draw or something. But I have a guest.

Last week a pair of robins built a nest in our extending ladder out on the porch. Since Monday they've been sitting, in turns, on that nest, making it difficult for me to get out there without disturbing them. I managed to hang laundry on the line while the male was away for a few minutes, but he was back when I finished, so I carefully walked around the shed so I wouldn't pass the nest directly, put my basket down, and went back into the house. He stayed put. When I stepped out from the back door a bit later to try to take a picture of him, he flew a few feet away, stood on the porch railing and hollered at me. I quietly apologised and went back into the house. Ten minutes later he was back on the nest.

I love having a nest of robin eggs on the porch. We get a robin family almost every spring or summer, and it's fascinating to watch the birds build the nest, sit on the eggs, and hatch the babies, who grow from naked, pink blobs with huge closed eyes to furry-looking fledglings to juvenal birds who fly from the nest before more than a couple of weeks have passed.

I would really like to go sit outside on the porch this morning, but I don't want the robins to regard my porch as a dangerous place. I don't know if they'd abandon the nest, but I don't want to chance it. There were three beautiful blue robin eggs in the nest yesterday, and there may be more in there now. Soon the porch will be filled with the sounds of hungry hungry robin chicks, who are really quite loud when they think Mom or Dad is nearby with some food.

So I suppose I'll leave the porch to the birds for the moment. After all, in no time at all the chicks will be grown and then I'll have the porch to myself again. In the meantime I can enjoy having a little bit of nature up close and personal. It's a gift I appreciate.

Snowy Observations and Wishing for Spring

Last Friday I had a doctor's appointment to check in over lab results. While I waited in the exam room for the doctor to see me, I looked out the back window. The snow that had just fallen two days earlier was bright and largely unbroken - beautiful. I wrote this in my handy-dandy Moleskine notebook:

The exam room is snow-bright - the vast sheet of white behind the building reflects ths sunlight mercilessly. Twin lines of tracks, evidence someone blazed their way through the thigh-deep snow, criss-cross the field, reaching out toward a loading dock in one direction and the road in the other. Nearby a gazebo sits shrouded beneath a white crown. The tracks pass it by.

The snow-sheet, painfully brilliant to behold even with eyes squinted partly shut for protection, is beautiful, broad and unbroken except for the criss-crossing paths. Its surface is lightly decorated with crinkles from wind-blown snow drifting across its surface. The shadows of overhead power lines, barely visible above, stroke across the sheet.

A man in a Day-Glo yellow jacket and hood comes out to scrape ice from the loading dock's driveway. Against the backdrop of the snow-sheet he looks tiny, insignificant.

I never seem to get tired of writing about snow. I should use stuff like this in the story idea I had last month. I sure have written enough of it lately. Thankfully our forecast seems largely free of snow for the next week or so. I've enjoyed this winter stuff, I suppose, but I'm ready for spring. A friend online mentioned being eager for warm weather, the scent of freshly-mown grass, and birdsong. I second that. I can't wait until I can go out for a walk with only a light jacket, or hop on my bike and ride up to the bird sanctuary again.