REALITY?: Morning

Every morning between seven-thirty and eight, my neighbor calls me to let me know she is alive. She has been widowed now for five years (oh Andy, I still miss you so!) and is frightened of being found dead three days after the fact, as happened recently to someone she knew who lived alone. This is a reasonable fear, and though I tease her unmercifully about remembering to keep the air conditioning on in the summer and note that luckily she no longer has dogs in the house, I understand the worries of the lone survivor.

But this morning she tells me about four large brown birds swooping over our backyards, and wonders if they are the eagles. I do not know. It is too late for me to run out and confirm what they are as they have disappeared over the horizon to fish the river. I doubt that they are eagles, but I will not tell her so and destroy the excitement I hear in her voice. She is not an outdoors person, and needed to be prodded into noticing the world above and beyond her doorstep and car. But I take my coffee cup and head out the back door anyway, sit on the back step and scan the sky.

Cardinals, robins, grackles, housefinches and blue jays score the blue yonder in abundance. But I am patient, and these satisfy me for now. The trees are yellowing up from Spring’s slow entrance. The tips of maple trees silhouette against the sky like the many buttoned backs of wedding gowns. Soon the buds will burst and turn into seeds that look like something else, then leaves that look like something else again.

There is so much out there, more than you can see at any one time, in the morning sky.