". . . if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard . . ." -- Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz, Screen Play by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf
There are two goldfinches, their bellies flashing chartreuse in the now back-lit brilliance of low-angled sunlight. There are twelve robins grooming themselves, fluffing juvenile, puffed out feathers, red breasts swelling. A sudden rust flutter sweeps across my view, the orange undersides of a flicker's wings as it too alights in the elm's branches. The flicker has become a regular in our yard of late. Its soft gray back, spotted with charcoal is comical. Its ink black bib and the burnt sienna of its wings outstretched are operatic. The flicker is a gift, something I hold as a sign that our quarter-of-an-acre of wildness in the heart of this city's sprawl is a buffer zone, a refuge.
A barn owl, with a Pierrot face, lived in our cypress last year. I have not seen any of its pellets beneath the tree this spring, but I still see it flying at sunset just east of us. Last week, while I was sitting on the patio taking in the view of amber-lit treetops, the owl flew directly overhead in my direction. A white blessing, almost close enough to touch. A mated pair of Swainson's hawks, their wing feathers ink-dipped, also frequent our airspace. Last summer, the hawks resided in the opulence of the old oak just beyond our fence. Raccoons nest in the flowering palm next to the garage. Feisty jays, raucous mockingbirds, and oil-blue blackbirds are daily regulars.
Last night, with a full moon rising on indigo sky, we discovered a baby owl and its mother in the branches of the younger oak in the center of our yard. With my husband's astronomy binoculars, we were able to see the baby's huge eyes and round, flat face in detail. These new inhabitants are western screech owls. Their song is a fluted cadence and brightens my evenings. Still, their residence is as precarious as our own. We're only renters. Someday the property owner may decide to tear down this drafty old house, clear the trees and build apartments. For now, I treasure our double-lot suburban yard as a sweet country estate, despite the surrounding din of leaf-blowers, traffic, the adjoining day-care center and apartment parking lots. We are nourished by the green expanse and by our organic vegetable garden. For a time, there were even chickens.
Last Easter, we bought three chicks at the pleading of our twelve year-old niece, who was living with us at the time. For three months, they lived in a big box in the garage with a light bulb to keep them warm. Meanwhile, my husband built a luxury coop in the yard, and when the chickens were old enough, we moved them to their new accommodations. The largest hen, Spike, lived up to her name by proving herself a rooster at 4:46 one morning. Not much to my surprise. I had been suspicious of her large feet, pronounced comb and cocky attitude even when she was a mere adolescent, always seeking the dominant position in the cardboard castle. Once outside, the chickens' peace and our own was perpetually disturbed by concerned parent jays swooping down from the olive tree and tossing abrasive caws into the predawn. The chickens follows suit and the cackling pandemonium forced us to relocate them all to a local farm before ever an egg was laid. Now, I watch these first robins of spring, the sky to the east still a bruise of unfinished winter business. Sunlight reflects off water droplets and fills the air with color.
The flicker catches my eye. He descends the trunk of the elm until he is on the grass beneath, pecking for worms in the rain-tenderized soil, his head jerking from side to side to scrutinize for predators. The cat sleeps on the rug near my feet, oblivious to the potential feast a few paces beyond his cat door. I am grateful for his slumberous state, even though Willy is more pomp than circumstance and likely to scatter at the first squawk and wing flap. The chickens regularly scared him into hiding, though he stalked them with a lion's proud ancestral gait.
The robins sit like prim aristocrats, unconcerned with their usual hunt for worms, twigs and nesting sassafras. Although I need to resume other tasks at hand, I am unable to draw my attention away from the glittering, rain-speckled branches and their plump inhabitants.
I am content as I patiently wait for this photo opportunity to fade, for the rain to return and draw a curtain over the proscenium of light.