It is around 5:00 or 5:30 Friday evening – the last cars are pulling out of the parking lot. Everyone has gone home. If it were summer, in about an hour or so, I might see a deer or two wander across the parking lot. The odds are I won’t see another human soul until about 7:00 AM Monday morning. Oh, to be sure, a few cars will drive by Saturday on the little adjacent aptly named Oakpark Way. They seldom venture into our parking lot and the street dead ends just a couple of hundred yards beyond here. On Sunday there is even less traffic. It is just me, the deer, two or three squirrels, a very occasional raccoon, and a lot of birds.

There are eight to ten trees within a few yards of my window – an oak, maybe three or four pines, a couple of others but best of all a tree, or very large shrub, whose name I could not tell you. This latter one reaches to within two or three feet of my second floor window and above. Literally, at its closest, it is about six feet from my eyeballs as I type this. From here I can reach out and touch my window and if I were the window I could reach out and touch the tree. The seemingly millions of small leaves are cinquefoil, green, and variegated – similar to Manzanita leaves but a little smaller and the wood is definitely much softer than Manzanita. Anyway its myriad intricate branches provide perfect cover for my birds.

You might have noticed in one short paragraph they have became my birds. They are of course free but most mornings I do go out and throw a couple of handfuls of seed around the base of the trees. There is on a regular basis a steller’s jay, two or three woodpeckers, a family of four or five robins and a group of around thirty to forty small birds. The latter group probably consists of sparrows, finches or thrushes but I can’t remember how you tell one from another. There are also a couple of coveys of quail that visit on a semi regular basis. I have heard an owl on occasion and once a hawk flew by. And then of course in season there are my humming birds. There are at least two but I think probably three of them. They could be Costa’s, Calliope, or Anna’s but I think it is the first. One of them has now, on at least four separate occasions, flown directly up to my window, looked in and hovered not six inches from the window for a protracted period of time.

I am almost never lonely. I have the perfect space to contemplate space and our place in it. I can consider temperature and time, and anything else that catches my fancy. I have the serenity of memory. I love my weekends.

February 20, 2010 / Weekends / OC pg 20, © 2010 / CIP 796, Feb 23, 2010 / SHE