This morning when I opened the blinds to find my backyard covered with snow, I had to laugh at the first hopeful thought that entered my brain: I wonder if there’s a cancellation or a delay?
I took a picture of it. I had every intention of posting it with this caption: “Suddenly, a snow day doesn’t bring the same excited anticipation that it used to.”
I downed my usual glass of water and cup of coffee, then did something I never do at 6:45 a.m. on a Tuesday, mid-March morning: I grabbed my sneakers, coat, and dog leash, and I took Rosie for a walk.
Having been a lifelong Connecticut resident, I’m no stranger to the beauty of newly fallen snow–how it clings to twigs and branches, its rolling white blanket untouched by footprints and tire tracks.
This morning, however, I looked a little more closely, and I noticed something out of the ordinary. Perched eye-level in one of the snowy branches was a bird staring at me with his head tilted to the side. He continued to sit like a statue, studying me, until Rosie and I were two feet away. Suddenly, there was a frantic flutter before he ascended into the gray, soundless sky.
That’s when I realized the sky wasn’t soundless at all. Although I couldn’t see them, the birds were everywhere. It was a choir of cheaps, chirps, tweets, trills, twitters and caws, sailing in a cadence of highs and lows, like the brilliant chaos of an orchestra tuning their instruments before a performance.
I realized that maybe the bird in the tree wasn’t so out of the ordinary, either. Maybe he was there all along–but I’ve been so caught up in a world of parenting, planning lessons, correcting papers and getting to work on time that I never stopped to notice.
Doug can carry on all he wants about retiring in Georgia. As for me, I wouldn’t miss New England awakening to the spring for anything, even if it does make me write like a marketer on the back of a beer bottle.
Instead of posting about how snowy days now seem anticlimactic, I’ll say instead that my entire perspective seems to be changing.
Amazing what a little zombie apocalypse can do.
