I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE

While working on words upstairs, I heard an unusually loud call from Crow, the one who loves pineapple and hangs close around here a lot、 in hopes of more. He was so loud in fact that I thought he must be close above me on the roof; then not long after I heard a hard rapping on the thick glass of one of the big living room doors downstairs (visitors from up mountain who come by the inner road sometimes knock there).

I got up, went over to the loft railing and looked down to see who it was, and there was Crow, pecking at the glass! BOOM! BOOM! He pecked a few more times and, rumblecawing the while like a mafia wingman, tilted his head to look through the window and examine the inside of the house (he knew there was an inside!) as though to see if anyone was there, then he crowed again. To me, peering down from upstairs, the tone of it sounded a lot like "I know you're in there, where's my pineapple? I saw it in the kitchen window! I know you're in there... Fork the fruit over if you know what's good for you! I know where you live!" etc.

Then he hopped up onto the table by the door to get a higher look inside - I don't think he spotted me up there peeking over the railing - then one of his goodfellas called and he flew off, rumblecawing intimations of his return.

I guess I better peel that pineapple if I know what's good for me.

CROW DOES PINEAPPLE

Crow has a mad passion for pineapple. Bet you never thought you'd read that anytime soon, but veracity comes in strange forms. I wouldn't have mentioned it at all -- because, like you, I'd never even put crows and pineapple together in the same thought, and likely never would have -- except that a couple of days ago, after peeling a tasty pineapple, I put the strips of peel in with the kitchen garbage, which I then took out to the compost pile where the next day it would be covered with ashes from the woodstove.

Yesterday, on my way to dump the ashes, as I passed a nicely secluded area near the compost pile but behind the shiitake logs beneath the cherry tree, I spotted a couple of pineapple skin strips the flesh side of which had been burnished to a leathery sheen by must have been thousands of beak pecks. Every little nook and cranny (and there are many on the back of a pineapple skin, if you've ever looked carefully after a crow has been at it) had been stripped of every possible fiber of pineapple flesh until there was nothing there but the shiny ripply back of the pineapple skin, a sight rarely seen. Although I tried my best, I could not help but remark that the skin was absolutely impeckable. Certain sights have odd effects upon the solitary mind.

When I went out later to stack some wood I disturbed Crow, who had been alone with his treasure and now burst from that same spot, bearing in his beak against the afternoon sun what looked very much like a golden strip of fleshy pineapple skin. Seems he'd stashed them somewhere around there, where they wouldn't get firewood ash on them, and wanted to be alone with this prize beyond all prizes.

I thought he'd seemed a little giddy lately.