6:39 a.m. 21 degrees, wind NW 0 mph. Sky: three bars of transitory color, bright as a baby's smile, dense tangerine in the east fading to pastel mauve in the west, in between soft, airy blue. A celestial caress, blissful and lavish enough to make me forget that the earth hastens to iron. The dogs and I have heaven to ourselves. Permanent streams: even the rocks look cold, but the water still lullabies and soothes on a crisp morning. Wetlands: a heavy glaze, white and silent, weighted down by the cold air. Pond: feathery shards of ice coalesce in the shallow southern cove, then extend north, narrowly, along both shoreline, a frozen mask too thin to hold a virus.
Industrious red squirrels raid each others' midden—a morning of stealing, eating, chasing, and a lot of chattering, chipping, scolding—the winter dialogue of squirrels, a forgotten language.
I caught a mouse last night. Under the kitchen sink, in a trap baited with peanut butter. I put the stiff mouse on the stone wall by the garage, as I always do. By the time I returned to the kitchen, the mouse had vanished, stolen by a blue jay . . . maybe. Or a chipmunk, though they usually sleep in on cold mornings. Blue jays, their attention wavering between seeds and suet, own the front yard. Fly in from all directions, screaming like banshees, their voices bouncing off the halls of their throats. With a thirst for mischief, jays scatter doves and juncos on the ground and chickadees in the cherry. They stay all day, a bold, hungry brigade. When the curtain begins to close, now around four-thirty, jays repair to the pines, flush to the trunk, and screened by needles. Sheltered from the wind and the eyes of owls.
I'm drawn to blue jays the way I'm drawn chickadees. They're full of themselves, noisy and over-active . . . and abundant. Social to the extreme. (Although I don’t believe they have a sense of humor.) I expect, while stuck at home indefinitely, I shall become well acquainted with blue jays. And when I grow tired of them, I'll vacation in my living room, go out to dinner in my kitchen, or exile myself upstairs and dream Costa Rica, a homeboy's version of a staycation.