HAWK IN LOVE: MOVE CAR

Last evening I was driving home when I noticed in the dim light of the rear view mirror something that looked like two straps hanging down from the interior ceiling rack in the back. I made a mental post-it to straighten that jumble out in the morning.

True to my note, in the morning I went out and opened the side door of the van, got in and reached to put the straps back in their places, at which point I found out there were no straps hanging down: it was something on the outside of the back window.

I got out, went around to the back and there observed in the morning sunlight that it was two impressive streaks of bird contribution. Just a bit of bad synchronicity. So I got out the hose and the long-handled car brush and began to scrub away what by this time was more like stucco. It ran from the roof down to the bumper! Then I got out the ladder to get at the roof part of the mess and when I got up where I could see the whole roof, it was like looking at the floor of Jackson Pollock's studio.

Turns out that during hawk courtship time, one of the taloned romeos had taken as his love perch - whence he sang his heartfelt laments to the seductively spiraling Mae Wests of his species - the long bare branch that shoots out from one of the tall hinoki trees in front of the house, right above our open-air garage. This effectively transformed our pristine red van into a hawk outhouse.

So I hosed and scrubbed the whole roof until it was as shiny red as the rest of the van, which took quite a while, but since I was up there... I myself was in no danger of a direct contribution, now that hawk courting is over for the season, but looking at the branch I could see that from that high up, and from that large a bird with that large a contribution, the impact upon the car roof must have been considerable, which explained the decidedly Pollock effect... and was that the strange distant booming I'd been hearing last week, that I thought might be a hearing problem?

Anyway, now I have to make another note to myself, on a large, long-term mental post-it: "Hawk in love: move car."