Early this morning I watched a robin sitting, very upright and alert, on the gable of the house next door. He had his back to me and was surveying whatever he could see from where he sat, carrying himself like a little kestrel.
I thought of The Secret Garden and the robin in that story, and of Cormack McCarthy’s The Road and the absence of birds and live things in that story, and suddenly I felt enormously grateful that the apocalypse has not happened, yet, here, and that the robin was there and has dozens of siblings on our block alone, and that the wrens in their tiny bodies are singing songs that are sometimes louder even than the trucks passing on the street in front of the house, and that one of the azalea blossoms I picked yesterday and put in a tiny vase has opened overnight.