twitterers

We eat breakfast with the birds, Ed and I. Perhaps not in the way you imagine – we don't all sit down to the same meal, served in the same space, but we're eating and so are they and it all seems rather communal on this gorgeous late fall morning.

Later, I go out to watch the twitteres finish their morning meal.






If I moved too much, they would disappear. But in fact, it is not hard to sit still, face toward sun, camera trying to pick out the bird from between the apples.






Ed finally goes back to painting and I join him up on the roof, taking my work there for as long as the sun stays with us -- which isn't terribly long: it sinks below the eaves and eludes us soon after noon. I'm catching the last corner of it here.





Like a kid, I have to have my turn at the painting. Let me, let me... It’s fun, so long as you are interloping and can give it up as soon as your arm grows stiff from the elevated back and forth.

Ed keeps on painting, I keep on working, indoors now, until it is close to the café’s closing hour.

We bike over in what has to be near perfect end of October weather. It’s my first burst of exercise since the motorbike tumble and I can’t say that my ribs aren’t sore from the effort. But, I tell Ed that we have been underusing significant muscle groups and so we push on. All of the “long” seven miles it takes to get there and back.

At the café Ed eats too much and sleeps too long and I mentally subtract the amounts of food I'll be needing to prepare for supper. For once I do not mind. It’s not a day for cooking, It’s a day for letting the sun warm your back as you pedal home. And for pausing to watch the pair of sandhills pick and choose from the bounty of roadside foods.





At the café, a customer was telling me that a friend has seen cougars some fifty miles north of us and yet another has spotted a black bear – a mere five miles west. Tall tales over a late afternoon coffee. Next time I’ll throw in my two sandhills. It wont trump cougars and bears, but I live among birds these days. They are my story.






In the alternative, I can brag about progress in farmhouse painting. Ed tells me by the end of the season, this north face should be done.






Ho hum? Okay, let’s go back and admire the sandhill crane.