...its song muffled through the closed up winter window sashes. The heat clicks through the hot water baseboards in my bathroom, the morning news speaks so thinly from its cave in the other room that I can barely hear what’s new in the world today…but this one bird is what alerts me that I have been in a stupor of sorts, buried in snow and government paperwork. But that is the character of February. It is a good month for Lent. It is the month in which I write the least…move the least…eat the most and sleep the most. The attic overhead feels pregnant and overdue. The household file box needs its yearly purging. I take stock in my inventory, both in what I have collected and in what has somehow slid in around me like a storage facility. In February, its closeness turns claustrophobic and fills my nostrils like so much dust. I mull over things, incubate ideas about what’s next, brood and hibernate and absorb and fidget. What relief the one bird is, nature’s town crier, chirping that what is not here now, is preparing to return. Bulbs are energizing underground; they simply cannot be flowers all year round. So, back to the drawing board...
