They will not speak, the magical ones. 
Quiet, 
     quiet, 
         quiet... 
              until one day ... 
they are gone. 

We woke to one of those rare days of unseasonable warmth that occasion the deeply wintered, Y-ending months at the forefront of our calendar year. 
     Warm, but gray, a gentle rain fell, confining Peter Pan, Silky Josephine and I to the porch, where we watched a flock of Robins that had appeared in the yard, as if from out of nowhere.  

Earthworms, deceived by the rise in temperature and the patter of rain on what would be their rooftops, had come in droves, topside, and the Robins hopped from worm to worm, plucking them up and gobbling them down.    

‘If all they eat are worms?’ Josie asked of the Robins ...for she knew that this was very nearly the case, as she has been reading a great deal about birds lately ...‘And there are only one or two days during Winter that worms come out?’ She looked up to me. ‘How are they so fat?’

Indeed, the Robins were plump as gourds. Contented. As if Winter were a season of plenty. As if it were awhir with winged insects and root-fatted grubs, and not the season of teeth-chattering bleakness it actually is, devoid of all nutrients other than those few minerals found in the tips icicles and the crimped stems of browned leaves. 

‘The Robin Trees,’ I told her.

Silky’s eyes narrowed. I could see that in her mind she was paging through her bird books for some reference to these Trees. Finally, she tilted her head to the side that meant she did not know what I was talking about. Peter Pan tilted his head likewise.  

‘What’s are Robin Trees?’ Silky asked. 

‘Well ...’ I said, and took a seat to tell them of this wonder. 

You can almost understand why Silky Josephine likes to chew on Harley’s hind legs. 

They certainly appear to be, as she says, ‘Numbley’. 

Yummy, nummy, little and stubby. 

‘Elephants!’ we hear Silky Josephine say, the boys and I. 

She’s been finding them by the dozens. Ever since I read to her the story of Terra and Bella, the inseparable elephant and dog. In everything from dried leaves to her dinner dish. Even still, Peter Pan, Harley and I turn to where she points. You never know. And Silky sounds oddly certain.

‘Elephants! Elephants! Elephants!’ she says, dancing. 

And she is right. 

There, just above the horizon is a tribe, a herd, a caravan, a parade, trunk to tail, trunk to tail, gray and lumberous, gilded by the rising sun. Elephants. 

‘See?’ Silky asks.

'They're just ...' Peter Pan says.

'Elephants,' I interrupt. 'I do see them Josephine. I do.'  

And the four of us watch as slowly they fade into the day. 

Two Wrens have wintered in Carl and Priscilla’s nest above the back door. Franz and Hannah. In for the night, their tails poke above the rim of the feathered nest, like chopsticks, idle in some strange bowl of soup.

It is the way of men to take from the Earth’s makings, wood and steel and stone, and to build things. To fill these things with hope of long use and admiration, so much so that, for the attentive ear, they will often sing. Sadly, it is also the way of men to outgrow their need for these things that they build, to forget, and to leave them to the slow dismantling of weather.    

Over a yawn of silver-green river, there spans just such a forgotten thing. A bridge that once sang as sweet as any sunrise, but having gone so long unused by both man and machine, its voice was seized by rust, and its song trapped deep within its iron bones.  

The River, wide and old, and slow as the summer doldrums, remembers when the bridge was young and bright and red. When it still sang, its voice strong and filled with hopes of usefulness. The River remembers. For it was the River who gathered the last of Bridge’s expectations, that fell, one by one, like the chips of its bright red paint, into the River’s deep, green waters. Gathered the expectations, and carried them away to the settling sea.

From time to time, bits of river bottom grow restless and long for sunlight, full and still. 
     Snagging grain after grain of passing sand, they add to their height, working their way upwards, until finally they reach the fabric of the river’s surface, its underside, where they push and push, until the gentle whorls are rent, and into daylight they rise.

Their first years above water, these bits of river bottom are perfectly content with being only sand, with basking in the sunlight, shells and driftwood collecting at their shores. But spring after spring, seeing the buds burst forth green on the banks that flank the River, they begin to ache, as earth will do, to be productive, to bear life. 
     So the Bottom’s snag at leaves, compostables. They build soil, rich enough to catch the eye of any seed aloft, breeze-bound and in search of a patch of bare earth to set roots. Soil, solid enough to coax to their shores the walnuts, hickory nuts and acorns, cast into the river, afloat.            

As he knew the story of the forgotten bridge, Peter Pan was thoughtful enough to cock his head when he came to it, sparing a moment to listen for any hint of the song trapped within its iron bones. 
     Hearing nothing but the slow churn of lost hopes in the deep green waters below, he crossed to the center, and with his own great expectations, poked his head through the bridge's riveted gridwork and looked down.

There it was. Just as the story told. A bit of restless river bottom, bare of briers and grown tall with trees, its width and breadth no more than a boy with a slight limp could run, at least once, without winding.
     And in the treetops, bare now with fall, the nests. Not of twigs and sticks as a bird will build, but great wads of leaves. One, two. Twelve. Fifteen. 
     Peter Pan shivered with the odds. The grains of sand, stacked one by one to raise the river bottom ... to build an Island. The gathered seeds. The hundreds of floods thwarted over the years to husband such a fair stand of trees. Trees with nuts no less, food for the Island's sole inhabitants, who, with neither wings or an inherent inclination for swimming, arrived there on a log, cast by a chance strike of lighting into the waters upstream.
     There it was. Cut off from the World. An island inhabited entirely by squirrels.  
     Squirrel Island.
     Just as the story told. 

Above the whisk and prattle of my rake, we heard a sort of burbling, the dogs and I, as if somewhere, stones had been laid out, and over them, an oddly boisterous brook had begun to flow. 
     We looked upward, and westward, and saw that the noise came not from a brook, but from a flock of black birds heading in our direction. 
     ‘Oh,’ said Silky Josephine, for it was an enormous flock. 
     ‘Are we going to be okay?’ asked Peter Pan. And Harley, for whatever reasons, licked his lips. 
     'We are,’ I told Pete. But he drew close regardless, just as the first of the birds were directly overhead. 
      They flew as if inside of a great undulating tube ...their chatter filling the clear blue sky .... a tube, which at one point in our watching, seemed to reach both horizons, its beginning and end lost to sight. 
    Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes maybe, we watched in silence, in reverence. 
     ‘This morning I dreamed I found one hundred dog bones in my bowl,’ Silky said when finally the last of the birds had passed over and again it was quiet. Her eyes were still intent on the place where the flock had disappeared. 
     ‘I thought that would be the luckiest thing ever,’ she said and then turned to me. ‘But now I don’t think I’m a wake-up-and-find-one-hundred-dog-bones-in-my-bowl, kind of lucky.’ 
     ‘I think I’m more of a ten-million-birds kind of girl,’ she said, and stretched out in the warm December sun, where the whisk and prattle of my rake could carry her off into sleep and the odd luck of dreams. 
     ‘Ten million birds,’ Silky said, and slowly closed her eyes.