Grateful Blog: Day 54: There are little signs of Spring all around. The snowdrops blooming, the air warming, and a this sense that the darkness of Winter is lifting. It’s still gray, gray, gray and rainy, rainy, rainy but…but it SEEMS brighter somehow.
For me though there are several distinct signs of Spring that I look forward to. One is the first bloom on a Camellia bush. It should be any day now. Another is what I heard the morning: The song of a Red-Winged Blackbird. Like all music, I can’t explain why it’s my favorite. It just is. There’s something in its throaty delivery, that ‘conk-la-ree!’ that ‘one second song starts with an abrupt note that turns into a musical trill.’ It reminds at once of hollowed out snags and brushy woodland margins as well as desert marshes. And it gets to me, the way Bob Dylan’s music get to me. Bob’s always been a bit of blackbird himself, come to think of it.
And it reminds of Spring. Spring when I was younger, and would get the call from the National Park Service to come back for another season. Spring when I would pack the car and drive across the West to get to the Utah desert and pull over to stop a minute, take in some amazing view, and inevitably hear the Red-Winged Blackbird singing those rolling, cackling notes, punctuating the suddenly warm air with promise of days ahead. Yeah. Spring and the Red-Winged Blackbird. The 2 go hand in hand, wing to wing, and that’s left to do is pack the car and go…
