starlings, sky, and cranberries

[asakiyume]

At the Cold Spring Orchard today, so many starlings, thick on the telephone wires across from the main building, and in a bare tree by it, and more and more kept coming and finding room on those wires ("slide over; can I squeeze in here?"), and they were chatting to one another in their squeaky voices, metallic parts in need of oil, but they were cheerful and comfortable squeaks--not strained or agonized. So many, against a sky that was a broad watercolor sweep of gray. They filled up that sky with their chatter and their black silhouettes. They were crowd sourcing themselves. Then I opened the trunk of my car to take out a bag, and then I let the trunk slam shut, and they all lifted up,

all of them,

And they all stopped speaking,

and they gathered into one cloud and flew away without saying a word, the only sound the whirring of all those wings,

and I wanted to call, Come back

don't leave the sky so empty.

But they wouldn't have heard me.

....

In other news, there is a UMass cranberry bog, and they were selling cranberries from it. However, I bought only apples: Baldwins and Roxbury Russets. But I took the card by the cash register, with the photo of cranberries ripening on the bush (they look like coffee berries), and the links to pages with recipes.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Starlings all secretly harbor a desire to talk on the telephone.

I love starlings too. My older daughter was the one who first made me love them. She picked them out for admiring because of their speckled breasts and their yellow beaks, when she was little.