Walking east on Douglass Drive, a street in the Borough of Wilkinsburg just outside of Pittsburgh, Penn., I see fat white cumulous clouds, their bottoms smudged with a grumbling gray, posed against an impossibly blue sky, a blue I’ve never been able to coax onto a canvas. From the thick plot of trees on the north side of the street, birds launch into darting flight, and I pause at a small industrial park on the south side of the street to see a Mockingbird on a post. Behind the bird, a groundhog scurries from beneath one bush and into others. The Mockingbird eyes me warily as I approach, softly and in what I hope is a non-menacing way. It turns, and flashing white on its wings, flies into more trees. Douglass Boulevard has a heavy concentration of trees on each side, and I wish — not for the first time — that I knew more about identifying the trees in my environment.
In front of the west building of the Douglass Plaza apartments, I pause to listen to the screams of Blue Jays coming from the trees that surround and guard the grounds of the apartment complex. I stand still and scan the thick foliage for the sight of the birds; I cannot see them, and after a few minutes, they stop calling. Suddenly, in the sky above the trees there is a circling hawk. I watch it work, soaring and powering through the air, and the silence of the Jays is understood: Their alarm work is done. On a previous day I had walked past a tree that had a screaming Jay that I could see. It eyed me as I studied it, then hopped onto higher and higher branches and disappeared behind the leaves. But on this day, even though I walked to the edge of a lush green depression that trees guarded, I could not see the Jays. But the leaves and bushes trembled with life, and soon I saw a House Sparrow leap from one hideout and disappear into another.
Through a window that faces south in a sixth-floor apartment in Douglass Plaza, a bright color winks among the green that surrounds the building and catches my eye. I focus my Bushnell Powerview 7×262 binoculars on the orange-red brilliance that plays in a shaft of sunlight through the thick leaves and find that it is a leaf that, much as an euonymus bush will in the fall, has left the colors of its sisters and turned to a brighter and dying red. As the world rotates and the horizon slowly chews the edges of the sun, dusk descends on this section of Western Pennsylvania and I sit in a chair and watch juvenile Robins preen in a ragged tree. A telephone pole, straight and muscular, three of its five flexed crossarms laden with ceramic resistors, mocks the twisted trees that surround it. On the thick white lines connected to the transistors, birds sit as if notes on an abbreviated staff. In the gathering dark, a quick flitting is a Red-bellied Woodpecker that lands briefly on the Robins’ tree; finding it wanting for insects, it flies away to a thicker cluster of trees.
The day wanes and the cries of birds from the woods become fewer and I move my attention to the interior of my brother’s apartment. I prepare for us baked chicken thighs, brown rice and broccoli, and encourage him to eat it, for we must both build our energy for his upcoming cancer surgery, he as survivor and I, a caretaker in these days of his life.
cjon3acd@att.net