A Nothing Morning

A routine morning, a routine day, a routine stretch at work, a routine rotation at a workout. Easy in the saddle. Even enough time to mull over routine vs ritual as the coffee is being made. But, life, you know. Life happens.

I get the concept of being present in the moment. Those of us who make our coffee in the morning have our routine, a range of motions, filling, measuring, grinding. Waiting. I set the knockoff Tervis in front of the coffeemaker and to the left. My mug of many years’ service—chip and a hairline crack near the rim—to the right.

I pour the hot coffee into my mug, half-full, half and half already added. Half-full, the pseudo-Tervis. Top off the mug, the remainder into the Tervis. If I choose to do so, I can listen to the splash of the coffee, feel the heat of the coffee pot, smell the coffee. And ignore the rest of the world in my mind, in the kitchen, and beyond—to infinity even.

Last week—about mid-morning and hours past waking up and smelling the coffee—a thrashing about in the front trees and a sound, a sound unlike anything I have ever heard. I was reading and so immediately looked up. 

Clearly birds in the two young elms, but I couldn’t see them in the leaves. And that sound, not a cat, not a scream, not a squirrel—but what?

From tree to tree in the thickest patches of green, mockingbirds. Two? Yes. But that sound, beyond distress—what? And in the mix a third bird, a crow. A tumultuous, flailing chase, through the limbs and leaves.

The crow rockets out toward the street with the mockingbirds in pursuit—and those cries, shrill and pained and not for a child’s ears. Horrible, truly.

Now I am standing at the window.

The crow dips toward the road because—because the chick fell from its beak. A mockingbird chick. Mostly likely from the nest in the spruce near the end of the driveway. The crow pecks at its lifeless body, the adult mockingbirds flutter overhead, land and try to dash in and retrieve the younger bird.

Fending them off with flapping wings, the crow grabs the chick and manages to fly up maybe 15’ or so off the ground, and again the prize falls to the street. The parents—I must assume—are wheeling about in a frenzy, diving at the crow.

There can be no intervention.

The crow covers its target and takes pecks from the mockingbirds. Finally they relent, and in that respite the crow latches on to the dead and flies off with the mockingbirds trailing, soon beyond my range of sight.

Calm reasserts itself. Just like that. Time to pay a few bills before the mail carrier rolls through. And my mid-morning snack.