Fragments From Floyd

The house was chilly when I got home--cooler inside than out. A somber October sun the color of sky, a few shades paler, offered little light, and less heat. I stepped into my rubber boots--a country-dweller's slippers--for the short walk to the woodpile for some kindling. A small fire through the glass doors of the woodstove would cheerify the dark afternoon, would take the edge off the damp-cold before Ann got home. I zipped up my jacket and breathed the familiar smell of mid-autumn's demise in a million molding leaves.

The dog heard it first. His ears perked and he grew suddenly alert. The unsettling commotion above us was not in his or my repertoire of familiar country sounds; we put up our guard. It came from beyond the bare maples, from the near ridge behind the house--a rising backdrop where, a hundred yards away, you'd be fifty higher, looking down on the metal roof of a toy house.

Somewhere up in those adolescent pine trees on the broken hillside, the anxious voices of birds. Thousands of birds. Their frantic sound filled the valley, louder even than the babel of the creeks. Grackles, probably, maybe mixed with other blackbird kin--the loathsome, hapless starlings. But I could see not a one. Their invisibility only added to the eeriness of their thousand opinions: Listen to me! I have an idea! Let's go that a'way! Each one squeekchirped to his incorporeal companions.

Rising, falling as they turned on their perches as each new spokesman, spokesbird, took the podium, a hundred giant rainsticks inverted over and over, tinkling, waterdrop metallic voices that swelled just before they all took wing, became suddenly visible, following the advice of the most insistent speaker, and they were gone from sight, then from sound only to rise and swirl and return to the same two trees out of hundreds of trees on the same ridge having vetoed their twentieth or twenty-first itinerary. Undecided voters, uncertain of where or when, sure that they must go, more or less south, more or less soon. And at once they flushed, and headed north.