Friday, March 02, 2007

Yes, they closed down the highway; yes there is more than three feet of snow on the ground; where to go in all this white--to the hills of course, the fast wonderful hills.

This morning while I was trying to dig out a small path to civilization, I looked up and right over my head was a hawk, she had a chickadee in her beak and she did not move. I did not move. Ever so slowly she began showering me with chickadee’s feathers and then we both did our jobs, I made my path and she devoured everything except the small beak which now rests by the climbing rose bush.

I sometimes wonder why we need to make things beautiful—because this wasn’t beautiful, yet I wanted to wake everyone up and make them see that she had chosen me somehow, she had chosen me this morning to see her and I wanted to choose them. But I didn’t. Okay, so I made the children look and Em but I didn’t wake the whole block which was my initial reaction. The hawk was there for three hours or more without flying away until I called my best friend and asked her if she thought it was a sign.

It was.

1 comment:

Lyle Daggett said...

This is just remarkable. Three hours!

Early one morning a few years ago (sometime in March, whatever year it was) I was walking through Loring Park, and a hawk flew low across the footpath maybe 30 feet ahead of me. Appeared suddenly out of nowhere.

It flew across the path in perfect stunning profile. (A large one, I think a goshawk though that's just my best guess, I'm no kind of expert or even amateur.) Then it glided quickly off across the park and disappeared among the late-winter trees. All in perfect silence. A ghost vision.