Then I find myself breathing and smiling at the same time and I find I can see so many lights sharing surfaces including the very air that I am breathing and happily smiling within. This morning as I pedaled in the still cold, but scintillating bright air, I heard two warblers, pausing in my favorite utility cut on their way north (for these two, north from here could be further up the cut, or could be Maine, Canada)–a pine warbler and a chestnut sided warbler.

And in the environs of my house with my postage stamp backyard, and deeply shrubbed front yard, I enjoy the arrival and now growth to majority, of a mourning dove. The child dove perches in various locations front and back of the house, on structures, or on/in the grass, and the parents hover, heads together, perhaps discussing the child’s progress or better, just the beauty of their child.

I am not sure where the doves have located their nest this year. It very well may be in one of the shrubs. Two years ago it was in my neighbor’s cherry tree that hangs prettily over my driveway. That was a delight to watch. Last year it was in the top northwest corner of a behind-me-and-to-the-east neighbor’s within the gutter, behind the downspout from the roof. That nest, this year, is home to a mockingbird couple. I don’t believe their young have hatched yet, but I could be wrong. Mockingbirds seem to either perch very high and sing their repertoire, putting it on repeat for awhile, or they are flitting, quickly landing and launching, such that who can know whether they are adults or youth?

I also was visited one dank day several weeks ago, well, let me rephrase that, the neighbor’s cherry tree that overlooks my driveway, was visited by a crew of cedar waxwings!! Oh, I was very happy. It was, I believe, the last snow we had, well, snow/rain/sleet/hail/snow/rain episode that we had. That may have been in this month of April, may have been late March. I forget. Do you remember weather once it has occurred?

I am tempted to once again include ee cummings’ poem. But I will not. Instead, I will give you Billy Collins. Some might term him iconoclastic, others might term him pedestrian; I find him a simultaneously most accessible and puzzling poet:

Today

BY BILLY COLLINS

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

Source: Poetry