BIRD GOSSIP

Oh how wondrous are three-day weekends and no matter the brevity of your list, you never get it all done, because there's always a bigger list operative: the cosmic list, that stands waiting immutably for you when in the eagerness of all innocence you walk out the door to begin work on your own personolocal and much less relevant list, such as cutting firewood or caulking a wall, or some such rationally immediate objective. So although I did get a few of my own items done, there were just enough cosmic perturbations going to skew my aim a bit and have the Monday sun set as I was halfway done planting the beans I'd planned to plant since Friday.

But epiphanies abounded: Sunday morning when I awoke I heard a tiny, delicate ruckus going on in the dawn outside my window; looking out I could see nothing but some chestnut tree limbs and a few late leaves in sunshine, all very nice, until on closer examination with hastily de-bleared eyes I saw that the tree was festooned with tiny bark-and-sunlight colored long-tailed tits, like delicate christmas tree ornaments bouncing around, who in their formal wear went hopping from branch to branch pecking at tiny bugs and such, the tree no doubt liking it very much, I could almost hear it say "Yes...YES! Right--there--aaahhh!" over and over again as the suitably dressed and chittering mob passed through on a long and leisurely mountainside breakfast over an extended bit of bird gossip.