This morning as I ate my breakfast at the table and Blake ate his on his cage, he shrieked as I have seldom or never heard him shriek before, with panicky fear (not the alert call of the roof sledders the other day) as he leapt into the air and fluttered.
I followed him into the living room, calling quietly to him, and he dashed as fast as his dashiest waddle would close the distance between us. His crest was bent nearly in half, it was so high, and he was panting through his beak, body attenuated, breast heaving. He didn't want a full body scoop-snuggle but to be on my shoulder where he could watch and hide behind my head.
Our birdfeeder has become a birdfeeder-plus. RDC has seen it a couple of times but when I turned, my hand cupped over Blake's head like a horse's blinder, it was my first time to see the peregrine falcon perched on the nectarine tree, on the lowest horizontal branch from which the birdfeeder is suspended. I wanted to dump my little boy on his daddy so I could watch the raptor, but Blake was having none of that.
The falcon hoisted itself up and dropped into the evergreen tree before leaving. It's amazing. I would be so pleased if our birdfeeder were a regular stop on its hunting rounds. I know. I know that I said that about the squirrels, that I planted the sunflowers for them, and that I turned out to be lying. But housefinches and housesparrows are so much less important than birds of prey. I might be upset if its first victim (it hasn't been successful here yet that we've seen) were a chickadee or a junco, rarer and prettier than either housething.
It took a long time for Blake to calm down. He wouldn't be coaxed to the kitchen windowsill at all, even after the outside birds had returned to their black oil sunflower seeds. He certainly doesn't like crows and magpies aren't much better, but a falcon--where does his fear come from? Instinct, of course; if Australia doesn't have peregrine falcons (does it?) it must have butteos and eagles of some sort. But I still call Blake a very clever boy, cagebound and housebound as he is, for recognizing such a predator.
Beautiful. Snow to the eyebrows, just as it should be.
From this to this. Saturday, the mountains looked like this from City Park. Sunday, the mountains looked like that from Rocky Mountain National Park.
I do love the dark blue of the sky, the wind lifting the snow off the peaks, how the sun glazes the skin of the snow into liquid, the patterns on the surface from the melt underneath, the vertical thrust of cliff without snow.
I really don't know what to do about graphics.
Anyway, 5 miles easy snowshoeing.
And also this, Long's Peak across Bierstadt Lake. This is the halfway point, and where we stopped to fuel and water ourselves. We saw people feeding gray jays and I said nothing.
The day before, in City Park, I did not say nothing. A woman called for her daughter who had strayed far from the museum toward the pond. The mother, not dressed for snow, called, and the girl, tromping around in said snow, didn't obey, and they yelled back and forth
("Don't go any farther! Come back here!"
"Why!"
"Come back!"
"Why!")
and after closing half the distance between them having to listen to this I was sick of it and hollered at the girl, "Because she said so!" Which really helped, I know: it enforced the mother's inability to discipline her child and the girl's lack of need to obey her parent and the rudeness of random strangers and "because I said so" is no reason whatsoever. But they were yelling across 1/8 mile of snowy park, and my, I felt better for yelling. The downfall of society, that's me. Last I saw, the girl was moving, as if dragging a large dead tree behind her, in the general direction of her incompetent mater.
Thank you, Beth, for telling me the tag to make images work.
Rachel Ingalls, "Third Time Lucky"
A.S. Byatt, "The July Ghost"
Jamaica Kincaid, "What I Have Been Doing Lately"
Lorrie More, "Places to Look for Your Mind"
A.L. Kennedy, "Friday Payday"
Amy Bloom, "Sleepwalking"
Georgina Hammick, "The Dying Room"
Rose Tremain, "The Candle Maker"
Shena Mackay, "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land"
Helen Simpson, "Labour"
Marina Warner, "Ariadne after Naxos"
Margaret Atwood, "Happy Endings"