The Tiny Drunkard (by Joan Baez, 2025)
The newborn songbird plunges from her nest and lands on my concrete driveway. She is as light as a whisper, or the fall would have killed her. She plops down a few inches from my sneakers.
She skitters off, makes three rapid crash landings… rocking slightly between fits and starts, the breeze lightly ruffling minuscule tufts of feathers around her beak.
Next, she makes disorganized little hops, and then surprisingly bigger hops, peering this way and that (seeing anything?), wobbling like a tiny drunkard.
She flutters again, in great disorder. Three more hops and she’s off towards the hedge. Then suddenly, shockingly, she lifts off.
Up she flies into a wild plum tree where she hides, springing up and down on a branch as thin as her own spindly legs - her trampoline in the sky. Next, with one airy buzz of her wings, she lands on my head!
In this way she blesses me.
She will live her short, generous heartbreaking life in song.
Her beauty itself will offer us hope in the darkness and deliver us from all that is evil.
💚💙💛💚💙💛
I liked Joan Baez' simple little story which appeared on Facebook this morning.
It's hardly a headline getter, but still an important part of a day in the life of one of my favorite singers.
The incident was important enough for her to sit down and write about it so she could remember and so that others could enjoy and, most likely, identify.
The first thing I thought about after reading this piece was the conflict that I watched yesterday in our garden area.
A crow that seems to rule the domain in and around the garden got into it with Mr. and Mrs. Swallow.
I don't know what precipitated the little skirmish, but I saw that the crow was upset with the couple who have recently moved into a bird house on the garden fence.
What aroused my attention was seeing the big bird and the little birds up to some sort of conflict on the ground inside the garden.
The crow ran off. The swallows launched off and proceeded to dive bomb the area around the crow.
The conflict ended as quickly as it had begun, but it presented a dramatic moment in nature, reminding us that all species do not live in harmony all the time.
Things get under their respective skin just like we see with humans.
I've maybe mentioned before that such anecdotes make me feel fortunate to live on a farm, where different story lines play out every day as we are going about our business.
It's all for free and especially fun to stop what we are doing and simply observe.
This morning we have a sad story to experience here at the Lovestead. We have to remove a large shrub from the deck area.
Its a big bush with just leaves and no flowering.
A few weeks ago I noticed that the leaves which had been green were starting to fade into a brownish yellow color. I thought maybe the shrub, which I've since learned is boxwood, might not be getting enough water.
So, I faithfully watered it for a few days in hopes of seeing improvement. That did no good.
Bill and I reached a verdict yesterday that the plant has died and it needs to be removed. It takes up a lot of space, so to remove it would means a big hole in the shrubbery line-up.
Yesterday I went around to nurseries with a sprig from the other similar shrubs and finally found a match at Home Depot.
Bill will carefully cut the dead shrub with the chainsaw, and we'll haul it off. We're hoping that two boxwoods from the nursery will fill the hole left by the dead plant.
Not a fun decision to make in the height of flowering season, but it's likely that if we leave the shrub in place, all its leaves will fall off and we'll have an unattractive skeleton plant providing an ugly blemish to the summer beauty.
So, hopefully, we'll get 'er done today. Plus, with this warm weather, I want to transplant a few cukes and some tomatoes.
Anyway, that's our main story for the day, among other side plots. Maybe the birds or the horses or the dogs will create a few other tales to tell.
Happy Saturday.
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