I woke this morning just at sunrise and was startled out of my bed by a giant flock of birds in the yard. I’ve tried all morning to identify them as something other than starlings, but the traveling hoard suggests otherwise. Even before fully waking I registered them as being too many… Hitchcockish. There’s been another bird in the yard that I have been stalking. I think it may be a Brewer’s blackbird. There have been goldfinches as well. But now it is the hot middle of the afternoon, the insect hours: flies, bees, ants, butterflies. The hay in my neighbor’s field was raked and baled this morning. It is a mark of summer passing. I could make the comparison of a drawing being rolled and delivered for exhibition. Larry McMurtry compared herding words to herding cattle…I guess there is a metaphor in everything.
