She sat there. On that one branch. For hours. Literally.
She’s not a frequent visitor. Never a lingerer. Until
yesterday afternoon.
Not the nesting finch pair. Not the deceiver mockingbird.
Not the bullying jay. Not the blackcapped chickadee. Not the fat taupe guy
still no i.d. but who tauntswithoutknowing it the cat.
I was very.intently.editing
the final chapters of a months-long book project. Narrow corridor of gaze upon
the screen of computer in front of me. Diligently working toward completion
before post office closing time: sending off in the mail an imperative for everyone’s
emotional wellbeing.
But she caught my eye, peripheral vision intact as it is.
Perhaps it was the flutter of her being-preened
underwings.
Or the occasional scootching along that same limb that was
her hours-long perch.
But she caught my eye: when even my stale cereal beside me
went unnoticed and my dog’s enticing groans I did not heed and the cat’s
not-soft purr I ignored and the voice on the phone in the next room might as
well have been silence for all my powers of microediting were in such loud
volume in my head.
Every few chapters she would move.just.a.bit and I would
unwind myself from my hyperfocused tunnel of manuscript-perfecting to gaze out
at her in the cherry tree.
I took a photo. And another, during the thirty second
break my body called me to make after drinking lots of water.
I left the house to run a quick errand. She was there. I
came back. She was still there, surprisingly.
I resumed my hyper.editing.focus. Another wingtwitch and I
saw that her companion joined her on the same branch. Now two.
Not distracting. But noticeable…even in all that
inner.working.landscape.intensity.rush.but.diligence.
Very able to be noticed even in camouflage on the branch
with the grayskylighting background and tree without leaves but in abundant
white flower.
I edited a portion of natural history: an older man’s
reverie of childhood rural homesteading, a marsh and birds in abundance which he
listed by name and season. A breeze that rustled the wingfeathers and I looked
outside the birdlist on page and saw two doves apparently in conversation –
heads moving as we do when we speak, beaks opening.shutting, body language of
birds speaking in my own backyard as birds from eighty years and two thousand
miles ago speak from the text on page.
I stopped. Grabbed 35 mm. From different vantage point
grabbed a few
Later. Post office a celebration of a job well-done.
Completed.
And finally then: a breath. A long…deep…inhale.
Pause.
Look around at this landscape now – in this moment, on
this day, with these birds and trees and drifting clouds and sunbreaks and new
leaves shimmering and this dry cool air on my face as I stand outside in the
glory of the outer landscape. Inner landscape cleansed. And I know that it is
this that abides for me. And for octogenarians who revere, too, the lands from
which we come, the soils that sustain us, the scenes we can smell and taste and
see and feel under our fingertips even decades and lifetimes and countries away
from their origin. Which requires our attention now. Blessings to that man, his
heart, his farm, his family. We are kin in the world of all that has breathed
in once, twice, deeply, and seen the bird – the dove, the whomever – sharing
our breath.
All blog images created and/or photographed by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
