February 4, 2013

Cloudier and cloudier, from a sky thinly veiled with white cloud this morning, now it's shrouded with gray and getting darker. In this light, hard to find a bright spot, but when I came home, the buds on the maple tree are much bigger now, looking like the flowers they actually are, and the bees are out, honey bees, the first I've seen since summer. Looks like early spring no matter what the groundhog says. This morning the area temps were all around 60 to start with; it actually got warmer during the night, except for Conroe, north of Houston. I think Conroe keeps their thermometer in the shade and under a sprinkler. They are nearly always a good deal colder than places just a few miles away. This morning was not an exception to that occurrence, while everyone else was about 60, Conroe came in at an even 50, almost ten degrees lower, 15 degrees compared to some places!

Leaving school there were so many birds, an entire field of grackles, and all along the wires some tiny little birds flocking there. Some kind of finch or sparrow I think because they had yellow bellies and brownish gray backs. They were sure excited about something, the noise level from those tiny birds was tremendous! The grackles always fascinate me because they sound like they have a little electronic mechanism that makes their sounds, whistles, clacks, whirrs, they don't sing but have a huge range of sounds that make them so interesting to listen to. This morning my students were a lot like those little birds on the wire, they were so noisy, but it was a good kind of noise, mostly talking and laughing and full of high spirits. I had to remind them we were still in the library, and they mostly settled down, but I had to remind them again later. The eighth graders are doing the state tests and I reminded them to go quietly in the hall ways. I kept waiting for announcements and the bell, even though I knew they would not be doing that today so as not to interrupt the ones taking the tests. I waited until I saw kids in the halls before I dismissed mine, not knowing exactly when they were supposed to be released.

I wanted a poem about work, instead I remembered a poem about sparrows, Hardware Sparrows, ones that had taken up living in a Lowe's hardware . . .

Hardware Sparrows

Out for a deadbolt, light bulbs
and two-by-fours, I find a flock
of sparrows safe from hawks

and weather under the roof
of Lowe's amazing discount
store. They skitter from the racks

of stockpiled posts and hoses
to a spill of winter birdseed
on the concrete floor.

How they know to forage here,
I can't guess, but the automatic door
is close enough,

and we've had a week of storms.

They are, after all, ubiquitous,
though poor, their only song
an irritating noise,

and yet they soar to offer,
amid hardware,
rope and handyman brochures,

some relief, as if a flurry of notes
from Mozart swirled
from seed to ceiling,

entreating us to set aside
our evening chores and
take grace where we find it,

saying it is possible,
even in this month of flood,
blackout and frustration,

to float once more on sheer
survival and the shadowy
bliss we exist to explore.

Even the little sparrow has something we need to learn, making the best of things and still singing. I think they were clever to find a place with food, and shelter, and little danger. Yet, I wonder what the people working there thought of them, and the other customers. I have seen little birds in hardware stores and even our grocery store. At the nursery, where most of the buildings are open to the outside, they fly in and out as if it were all one big world, inside or outside, it doesn't matter. When I see them in their little flocks, and they come to the water bowl or play in the trees, they always make me smile. I can imagine people that day in the hardware store smiled as well to see such enterprising little creatures!

Spring is creeping up in buds and bees. I know it's supposed to be winter, but . . . somehow I'm not the only one who doesn't believe it.