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Friday, May 31, 2002
I've been living in my house for about three years and I finally made good use of the tire swing in the back yard: I swung around in circles and watched the sun come up. I’ve never really noticed it before, but early mornings are full of birds. I've always heard them singing, but I never just watched them. They're everywhere, flying around, having a party.
I imagine that early mornings for birds is the same as Friday nights for humans. They are living it up, hobknobbing and rubbing elbows with all the other bird-folk around. There are birds of all different kinds sitting on telephone wires and fences. There are male birds chasing female birds all over the sky (and, I suspect, some females chasing males as well). I watched a group of five or six finches chase each other around trees, through the air, and even on the ground in some variation on the game of Tag. Though I could never quite figure out who was "it" -- or if there was an "it" -- they seemed to have the game down to an art. There was hummingbird that kept chasing off another hummingbird from his apple-shaped feeder. The barn swallows were probably the most rowdy bird; they careened in and out of every window and doorway on the barn. Their split tail reminds me of spoilers on snazzy sports cars. They were showing off just how cool they could be by swooping perilously close to every post and rafter as they chased each other around the wooden building.
I discovered that there was a cat living in there, in the barn. She was walking next to the horses when she spied me. We looked each other over. She was mostly white but had several patches of dark brown. She had the poise of a domesticated cat – she didn’t slink or make quick glances at every moving thing – and she sauntered like only a cat owned by humans would. But it was obvious by her size and stature that she didn’t have the luxury of laying about all day on someone’s sofa and eating Fancy Feast. She had definitely been an outside cat for some time. After she had looked me over, I guess she decided that I was bad people and trotted back into the safety of the barn. I asked my dad about her and he said that she had just shown up one day, but she was very friendly. He also said that she had a litter of three up in the hay loft. I think I’ll go play with them.
| Mr. McBastard | 7:43 AM | | |
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