2020-05-24



Over the past few months I’ve been one of the fortunate to be able to work from home. The desk that I have set up is at a window that looks out at the backyard and while holding myself to a somewhat regular nine to five routine, I’ve been able to watch Spring slowly unfold the world back to life. But starting around the beginning of April was a very large crow who decided to make its home my home. Like clockwork, every morning I could find it poking around in the lawn and for what reason I couldn’t guess. As with others, I’m not the biggest fan of crows. Especially during a viral pandemic.  With that large, ominous beak, I kept thinking how it looked very ‘bubonic’, like those masks the doctors wore during the Black Plague. 

When it first started showing up I took a close look at the yard to see if I might find something to explain why it chose my property for its new territory. Meaning, I was looking-- and smelling-- for something dead.  And I’ve got some past experience with this sort of thing. A few years back, I found lying in the grass a piece of hind leg from a rabbit, presumably a remnant from a melee of some sort the night before. I decided to just toss it into a half filled lawn waste bag that I had sitting in the garage, which wasn’t the best decision because the next day a bunch of crows kept circling around the house. But this time around, no carrion seemed to be involved (thankfully). 

Eventually I just stopped paying any attention to the crow and left it to its own way. Over the weeks that followed, the colorful tones of cherry blossoms and the vibrant pops of tulips replaced what I saw as a black, feathered embodiment of miasma. I soon forgot about the crow all together. But during this weekend, while sitting out on the deck for the yard, I saw the crow again, now making short back and forth flights from one tree branch to the next, and close behind, three or four fledglings taking their own first flights. This is how we learn.


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