Saturday, May 5th. . .
Early morning...patio...coffee...birds...never-ending traffic. The house is quiet. Dan has gone to work and no one else is up yet. The only obstacle to this otherwise peaceful moment is the fact that I am having a 'doozey' of an allergy attack that is not only leaving my nose raw but is sending piercing jolts of pain behind my left eye and throughout my sinuses. My traveling in spring and fall, as a rule, means that I get to experience these symptoms four times a year instead of just two. So be it...minor inconvenience...small stuff...all that.
I'm watching a female cardinal flitting between the Rose of Sharon bush and the roof top, and I'm wondering if there is a nest nearby. Now and then, she flies down into the woods. I wonder where she goes in there and if she is on a mission or if it is her safety zone that she retreats to while she plans her next move. Aha! I do see a nest in the Rose of Sharon bush. It's pretty well hidden. So well, in fact, that if I didn't happen to see the bird, I never would have noticed the nest. Maybe it's not even hers. I'm not as familiar with the nesting habits of cardinals as I am with the robins and little house wrens back home. Cardinals are not quite as common there. Occasionally they come to my feeder but they seem to appear mysteriously from the woods. The house wrens, on the other hand, are very brazen about setting up housekeeping right under my nose...and sometimes in the oddest places. The robins are very predictable, returning to the same nests year after year. I've always envied their long distance directional sense since (as Bob often took delight in saying) if 'they' put me in a room, turned me around three times, I wouldn't be able to find my way out. (It's true...I have said good-bye, then walked into many a closet when leaving someone's home I wasn't familiar with.) The GPS for my car has become one of my best friends. How nice for birds, that they have all that built in.
On Monday, I'll be leaving here and driving to Jenn and Allen's which is a three-hour drive that includes a series of many different routes and turn-offs. It will be interesting to see how that goes. It will be an adventure, that's for sure. My kids used to say, "wherever we go with you, Mom, it's always an adventure" and I would say, "just think, if I had gone the right way, we never would have gotten to see this!" When in doubt, my instinct is always to turn right...so I suppose I could end up driving in a big circle.
Such is life -- a big circle. Sooner or later, all things overlap and come together in a most adventurous way. How we are affected by the adventures; the circles, in our journey all has to do with our own perspective. Life is what happens; not what happens 'to' us.
The sun is peeking through the Rose of Sharon bush now, proof that the earth has made another of its own circles. (How many is that now?) Mrs. Cardinal has circled around again, swooping over the bush with the nest.
I'm thinking of a song......"Round and round goes the circle of life; jump right in to the circle of life......"
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