Nesting birds

On my way to and from work, I pass a couple of small artificial islands off a bridge.  The trees on these islands are virtually leafless, presumably because of highway salt and pollution.  This doesn't, however, stop hundreds of birds from adopting these islands as home.  The tree branches are always chock full of birds and the land underneath is white from droppings.

Today as I went by I saw that it's nesting season.  Scattered throughout these dead branches are dozens of large, messy puffballs of nests, and perched on each one of these disordered creations sits one bird.  I wish I could render the image better because it's absolutely Seuss-like, trees and trees of dozens of fuzzy nests with a bird on top.  Got a good smile out of it.

Magnolias

I love to have my breath taken away and something that does that, in springtime, is magnolias.  What a wonderful tree!  Discreetly preparing its blossoms, teasing us with glimpses of pink and white -- and then it breaks into splendid bloom with its enormous yet delicate flowers completely overwhelming the landscape.  And then, far too soon, it's all over, and the tree pulls in its beauty for another year.  I cannot pass a magnolia tree without slowing down or stopping to wonder at it.  So incredibly lovely, and yet so ephemeral.

Dreams

A quickie.  (Can it really be that I've gone 8 days without finding something beautiful??  Attribute that perhaps to being sick.)

Ever have a dream that not only stays with you, it takes on an importance in your groggy first-woken mind that tells you it's significant?  In that fuzzy neverland where we know more than we think we do, we see a truth that we were either unaware of or ignoring.  I had one of those last night (and no, I don't plan to bare it).  Whether the significance I give to it is real or in my imagination, the very fact that I give it that significance means that the situation is important to me.  Which is all that counts, after all.

Gotta love it when your mind finds a roundabout way to tell you something you think you might not want to hear.

Spring

Is there, honestly, anything greater in this universe than an early spring day?  Warm, life-giving sun, fresh aromatic air, signs of new life popping up everywhere...including in people's step!  Everyone's outside, everyone's cheerful...  My question is serious.  If there is anything better out there, I would like to know what it is!

Living in the present

My father is 90 years old and has been living in a nursing home for a year.  He has a number of the issues that the elderly have, brittle bones, hesitant mobility and especially increasingly bad short-term memory.  He can tell you about toboganning on the farm when he was a kid, or what it was like to work in Vanuatu just after retirement, but he may need to ask me the same question three or four times during our visits.  It's also difficult for him to process information which is either complex or spoken quickly.

As you'd expect, this can make finding topics for my regular visits difficult.  I know he'd be interested in my kids' activities, for instance, but telling the story requires an attentiveness and complexity he can't muster any more.  Our conversations are summaries, delivered in easily digested sentences.  For a while I was finding it a real labour.

Until I hit on the magic trick for communicating with someone with memory problems:  stay in the actual present moment.  I can't regale him with tales of our recent weekend, but we can talk about the cloud formations in the sky; he can tell me about the numbers of planes that are visible from his large window and he loves to speculate how far up they might be (he was in the air force in World War Two.)  We walk in the garden when it's nice and look at the progress of growth of the many different plants; I can ask him some of their names and many times he can tell me:  gardening was one of his passions when he was more able.  Thus it is that our conversations, far from being a laborious task, have become a sort of mini-holiday for me.  I am preoccupied with nothing other than the details of the present moment, and communicating with my beloved dad.  I am so happy to have made this discovery.  Our times together now -- especially when it's nice out! -- remind me of some of the close conversations of our past.

If only I could be there to look at the stars with him like I did when I was a little girl.

Wrong weather

Snow is forecast, warned my husband.  I pooh-poohed the very idea:  it's a week into April, after all!  If it does snow, I blithely supposed, it will only be raindrops temporarily converted which will turn back into nothing but water once they hit the ground.

So imagine my disgruntlement when I awoke this morning to a world of white, yet again.  Not just lawns, but sidewalks, streets, rooftops...  I could hear the collective groan of consternation and disgust throughout the whole region as we all dragged back out the scarves, the hats, the boots and winter coats we had happily consigned to back basement shelves.

But.  Yes, but.  As I walked to my workplace I couldn't help but wonder at the delicate white tracings on the sides of trees, at the gently falling snow muting the morning's street noise ... and I had to admit grudgingly, yes, snow is enchanting.  Even in April. 

Colour in rain

Have you ever noticed how rainy days are so heavily grey that any other colour cries for attention?  Things that normally look quite banal become remarkable because their brightness pokes through the greyness.  The magenta ball neglected in someone's front yard.  The blue headscarf on a pedestrian.  The brilliant red umbrella.  The blue and yellow goalposts reaching into the sky at the local high school.  The bright yellow car streaming by.  The blazing red taillights.  If you get into the right mindset, the objects take on an almost surreal importance simply by the fact that they stand out in the grey -- rather like Spielberg's little girl in the red coat in "Schindler's List".  Very neat.

Old Music

I don't care what anyone says, you can't beat some of the old, mindless rock and roll for sheer energy.  (I call it housecleaning music -- or now, rowing music, downloaded to my MP3.)  My husband's reaction when I came home with my "Best of the Beach Boys" CD was "Oh, God!".  But sorry, you just can't beat bein' a middle-aged broad shooting down the highway with "Surfin USA" blaring on the CD player!!  Gotta love it!