Taking in 2020 from catbird seat
In our latest chapter of Three Months that Shook the World, I find myself a half-sad empty nester.
Nope, we don’t have kids with whom we have been locked in a titanic, 100-day struggle between acoustic Americana music and Run the Jewels, although the super-loud birthday party in a neighbor’s yard the other long day’s cacophony into night gave us a taste of what a domestic musical argument might entail these days.
If there’s anything this viral plague has taught us, is to better notice the world through our limited little lockdown lookouts: the lack of vehicular traffic; the metallic whirring of the idling delivery trucks, their doors echoing open and closed; the occasional pulsating Harley enjoying the final arrival of spring.
And since we’re in the famous Naugatuck Valley, one can’t discount people such as the clerk of the Derby gas station, who, in a successful bid for permanent customer alienation, failed gloriously to wear a mask while adjusting the gasoline price signs the other day in an anti-socially distancing, if not actually menacing way.
At least Derby and Shelton had Black Lives Matter protests, even as Shelton Mayor for Life Mark Lauretti cut the Republicandominated Board of Education budget by $2 million, because, you know ... taxes still trump kids in this faltering American
When you sit long enough, exchanging concentration on the laptop with glimpses out the window, you can actually see quite a lot.
I watch new residents of our mostly absentee-landlord block haul mattresses up steps like fugitives from a Laurel and Hardy comedy. We are constantly checking the progress of the tomato plants, not that we want to accelerate the calendar any more than the three-month lockdown has shown us.
Only one week until the longest day of the year and the backslide to Dec. 21? Don’t say it.
We’ve gotten much more interested in the avian community this year, from the haphazard robins darting among the lawns, to the melodic moans of the mourning doves and the aerial shenanigans of the chimney swifts swooping and scooping insects high above the rooftops.
Then there are the very elusive northern flickers, whose occasional squawks tantalize.
As often as I hear them, mostly up the hill where the nicer houses stand on bigger lots, the neighborhood flickers have eluded me for years. This year they returned in early March, around the time the White House promised the coronavirus was like an influenza that dropped out of college.
The flickers, the only woodpecker that feeds on the ground for you folks keeping score, even have the nerve to find the big scary maple tree in the backyard and beckon me in the predawn before the cats gang up in their demands for breakfast.
The little thatched bowl of catbird nestlings hidden high up in a rhododendron have finally flown off, and they’re now flitting around our neglected little downtown yard, gathering their own insects, whistling and squawking, while we wonder whether the pair of parents have time for another brood.
As ubiquitous as the catbirds have been, clucking, strutting and looping around the yard, perching in the dogwood and checking us out with sideways glances and long, pumping tails, we didn’t really figure out where their nest was until the other day.
I thought it was in the lower yard, on a nearly inaccessible hill, which after daffodil season becomes a mass of the kind of undergrowth that the bird guides say they love and can return to every year.
But nope, it was in the bright-red rhododendron, within feet of the front door, where we found the three open-mouthed nestlings. Fortunately, we aren’t feeding too many stray cats these days, so they had a great chance with their initial test flights.
Now we have five catbirds, helping with pest control and generally mocking us, since they in the mockingbird family.
Our little corner of the community garden is a 10-minute ride up the hill, on some former farmland, where we and 20 other families have been planting and weeding and watering.
It’s heavily wooded around the garden, and as usual, the flickers were always audible, but never seen.
The other day I abandoned the laptop for a lunch break and drove up the hill to the garden for a quick session with the hose.
It was a quiet and sunny late-morning, and I let the car slowly roll down the driveway, enjoying the view. I saw a tan flash rise up from the meadow into a nearby apple tree. Yes, a flicker, larger than a pigeon. As I followed the driveway around to the right, the mate rose up and headed away from me to the tree line, flashing its distinctive white rump.
The pandemic spring was finally complete.