I think I need more red winged blackbirds. I need grackles and starlings. I need the thrill of birdsong. I grew up in a desert. In a desert filled with orchards and it was all birds. As I child I measured the seasons by their comings and goings.
In the spring I sat on the chilly front steps in warm sunlight and listened to the blackbirds liquid exalted trills as they clung sideways to the bullrushes. All black and red boldness. They arrived with the robins and the finches and everything was a shouting at the thaw, and the sweet, sweet dirt.
In summer, in the dry dusty heat under willow trees, I sat with no skin touching other skin and heard the tired flap of crows. At dusk the peewits burst from the tall grass and landed and my long brown-skinned, bare-footed dusk was full of the short sound that named them.
The fall was filled with gatherings. The small dark birds would line up on the power lines for days. They would gather and chatter and wheel away as one and return and then suddenly they would be gone and the air would be empty except for the smells of burning and sound of chainsaws and dry stalks clattering. Then, weeks later, on the day we put up the storm windows the geese would go and those long forlorn v’s would point away from where I lived.
I live now in a place filled with the endless sound of crows and seagulls, the same lack of variety and pace as the endless green and alien wetness.
I miss the blackbirds. I miss the measure.
