On Peace 1

My mother will sometimes quip that she is part plant – something to do with being solar-powered. It must be a gene I’ve inherited because I pop awake with the sun. Daylight savings wreaks havoc with me.

This past summer, I picked up the habit of decamping to the back porch in the early hours with the new puppy, who also has a fondness for early-morning risings, to watch the rest of the world wake up. I’m not quite as hardy in the winter, I’m afraid (I tried it and my capillaries did not thank me), so now I take in a patch of sky as it lightens behind the trees from my office window. This morning, as 30-mile-an-hour gusts whip last night’s snow into funnels and ribbons, I think back on one of those temperate mornings:

Breath in, breath out, deep and clear; the sun just starting its rising, the sky cornflower blue behind the canopies, bleaching towards golden, towards that indescribable brightness beyond color. A crispness of dew still tingling on the skin of my face. The chitter of birds chorusing across the street, down the alley, a widening web laced vertically, a community abiding thickly and lightly above our own.

Peace.

A crow swooped from a neighboring pine. On its heels, two robins, three, males all, by their burnished breasts. They dove, soared, circled, dove again, harrying the crow, which landed in our yard to stand its guard in our grass, very little concerned by the accosting robins, who hurled a chorus of expletives at it.

The crow retrieved a chip of aquamarine from the lawn. One of my children’s toys, I thought, but no, reaching towards a precise color word set me right: not aqua, not turquoise, not just blue, but robin-egg blue. The crow had been at a nest. Already mid-summer, chances were it was no mere yolk that served as feast.

I started to moralize, to story, cheering on the team of robins before it settled in me that the crow, too, would have babies to feed. My mourning and my morals were misplaced, though I still couldn’t help but be impressed by the way the three males had banded together in a common cause. Each, no doubt, with its own territory; each, on any other day, rivals. But that day they cooperated, for defense, yes, for violence, war, in fear.

At last the crow took slow flight, over the fence, and, as the alarm call of the robins was taken up like a claxon all down the lane presaging the crow’s arrival, I wondered what it’s like to be so reviled everywhere she flies. Is her rest always shot through with alarm calls? How can she rest?