A hundred starlings flying around the house disturbed my dreams, pulling me up from sleep's depth with their swirling. It is impossible not to think of Hitchcock’s birds. It is impossible not to want to get out of here.
Starlings have claimed the mornings but in the evening a reasonable flock of yellow warblers and a few red-winged black birds perched in the choke-cherries across the road. Occasionally some collective signal lifts them from the branches and then they settle back down again... maybe spreading to the nearby fence wires... never swarming or threatening.
Wild swings govern my days. The desire to go home suddenly swirls around me, overwhelming... a flock of starlings lifting from the ground at once in a clatter of wing flapping without indication of their unison direction. Both cause me to duck, hoping to avoid collision.
Other times of day are not governed by sudden movements; the rhythm of work setting a tone. It is not complete stillness but movement back and forth with small rises of energy. In these times I am saturated with the desire to continue, as content as the warblers on the fence. But I am imagining that even the warblers must be feeling the urge to re-locate given the hint of winter in the morning chill.
