Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp?....
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.Duke Senior, As You Like It
Shakespeare, natch
***
Tweet:
I'm diddling away my mortal coil here instead of staring at stars. Which reminds me--I need to go stare at some stars....
And then I hung around for another 15 minutes before I got out.
I'm glad I got out--a golden meteor streaked across the sky as though painted with glitter, sparks flying off the tail, a tail that extended more than half the sky. It shook me up.
I have never regretted a single moment spent outside. I've regretted plenty inside. If I believed in signs, I'd toss this machine off the kayak....
***
In the past couple of days I've heard two croakers complain as I wrestled hooks out of their jaws, squinched a few dozen cabbage worms, burned my feet on a hot jetty, cooled those same feet in the bay, picked tomatoes and beans, sliced open my finger, dared a harlequin stink bug to stink, stared at Vega and Venus, sank ankle deep into sand at the sea's edge, and watched tiny fish break the surface in an explosion of red light reflected from the setting sun.
***
My fledgling story:
I went into the garage just after supper yesterday to fetch the paddles. Some critter was flapping around noisily, but I was too busy running away to see it. (Yes, I'm a coward....)
A few minutes later, Leslie (much braver than me) found it--a fledgling robin, now exhausted, its beak gaping open, its chest billowing. The fledgling found a window--it could see the outside world, and it kept beating against the glass, its wings sprawled open against the pane.
Just a few feet away, the open garage door beckoned, but the bird was too frightened to see anything but its view from the window. It would die waiting for the pane to dissolve.
With the help of a crab net, I managed to get the bird out onto a juniper bush by the garage. I feared it would collapse from exhaustion. I cooed (ridiculous, I know) and slowly brought a hose to its mouth.
The robin drank. Then it drank some more.
In a few minutes it was gone.
***
As one who has trouble believing anything, not sure now's a good time to start putting trust in "signs"--but I do know this much. This computer screen is my garage window. I keep staring into it, looking at a world through glass, glass that cannot be broken, glass that will not magically dissolve.
No matter how much I tweet like the desperate fledgling.
Photos are ours, and we gave ourselves permission to use them.
