BY: JEFF GAUGER
What a swell morning to be alive.
Sunday. I’m in the Adirondack chair on the patio soon after 8. The air is crisp, the sky cloudless.
I gaze across the weedy lawn I mowed yesterday to a rank of azaleas in bloom, white with pink accents.
For the moment, my only companions are birds.
Two houses over, a murder of crows has for 30 minutes kept up a cawing racket high in a stand of tall trees. Three crows at first, then a few more, then still more.
I’m tempted to compare the crows to our Congress but dismiss that thought as unfair to the birds. As I wrote that last sentence, I tried again to count. Fifteen? Twenty? Something’s up. I wish I understood.
The feeders by the azaleas have drawn quieter visitors. A pair of cardinals. A house finch. A nuthatch and cowbird. Underneath, a white-throated sparrow scratches the leaf litter. I hear innumerable chirps and tweets and warbles – and farther off, a woodpecker’s rat-atat. And still the crows’ caws. Yes, what a swell morning to be alive.
Yes, what a swell morning to be alive.
Jeff Gauger is a former executive editor of The Shreveport Times who now teaches journalism at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Send comments, anecdotes, suggestions and brickbats to jeff.gauger08@gmail.com.
THIS ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE April 10 ISSUE OF FOCUS SB - THE INQUISITOR.