Trees full of Birds

On the first day of spring, Tom and I sat in our backyard looking up into the branches of trees arching far above us. The trees were full of birds. Two red-bellied woodpeckers danced around the trunk of the sweetgum tree. They circled the trunk again and again, one leading the way, bobbing its head, the other following. Last year we enjoyed the red-headed woodpecker that nested in a hole high above our neighbor's yard; we saw one there yesterday, as well. Robins hunted for insects in the front lawns, and bluebirds flew from yard to yard looking for a nesting place. Cedar waxwings have been migrating through here, too, remaining in the tops of trees; their high-pitched trill, however, gives them away. I always hear cedar waxwings long before I see them. They are a sleek, pretty crested bird with a black mask and yellow-tipped tail. I've heard their high-pitched buzz in Waverly Hall, Georgia, and in Central Texas, where they descend in flocks to feast on juniper berries.

Later that evening, while M-M was entertaining friends in the house, Tom and I ate dinner on the patio in the waning light. I lit candles around the table, and we sat in the dark drinking wine and eating pan-seared salmon, beets, red potatoes, and stir-fried bok-choy and beet greens. Across the suburban lawns, probably near the creek where we had heard it earlier and closer, a barred owl hooted. How I love to hear that call here in our 1940s metro-Atlanta suburb. That call carries me back to so many places, but most memorably to Old River, Texas, where I lived as a child, where six generations of Dugats had lived. Woods surrounded our home of eight acres, and owls hooted often, calling across woods in which my father had hunted as a young man.

Sometimes late at night, really in the early morning, while everyone in our house is asleep but me, that owl, or one like it, calls loudly in the trees near our yard. I open our front door and step outside. The street is dimly lit by street lights; the houses are dark. I wait, hoping for one last call. It's how I imagine myself at the end of my life--waiting, listening for that last call, the hoot of a barred owl or the tremolo of a screech owl, maybe the haunting call of a loon--some bird calling me in the waning light to whatever is beyond this flesh.

But now the birds are calling us into another spring. Some cultures celebrate their new year in the vernal (or March) equinox, "Nowruz" in the Afghan and Iranian calendars. (This week, one of my colleagues, originally from Iran, brought traditional Iranian sweets to work for us to share.) Makes sense. To a new leaf, a new beginning.