Quiet Time

How I wish, sometimes, that I had an expensive camera with a long lens.  But I might not have got so many of the starlings in one picture and, honest, I kid you not, the wire continued on at least as far on either side and was covered with birds. I'm sorry it was a gray day but, in fact, that is exactly the color the sky was.  I was with my writing group when, to quote an inappropriate-season poem, "out o the lawn there arose such a clatter" -- should be "chatter" -- and we sprang from our seats to see what was the matter.  It was a migrating flock of starlings. 

In this area they are the only bird that migrates in large numbers. When I read about how pigeons used to fill the sky by the hundreds of thousands, I cannot imagine it, I can only remember the flocks of starlings like this.  Sometimes a flock will land on the lawn outside my apartment.  Not crowded together, if there are five hundred, it's possible for them to scatter over  the lawn. They seem to each grab a bite or two of something from the grass (surely there aren't that many bugs!) and then they lift off and move on.

It is a quiet time for me, I now have, usually, Mondays and Thursdays without appointments.  Lovely! This coming week Monday is a holiday, of course, but it will be a usual Monday for me.  I'm getting a lot of writing done -- a poem a week for my class for one thing.  And a recent one has been posted on a blog -- www.Duane'sPoeTree@blogspot.com -- I hope it works for you. I doesn't always work for me.

Summer is definitely my favorite season, but autumn isn't far behind. At the moment I'm looking for a nice big red or gold leaf to copy in a quilt I am planning to make. I must take some walks in the neighborhood and perhaps around a near-by pond.  I'm sure I'll find what I need.