We are at  home, as many are, and I noted while cleaning that if you have low windows—which we do—and have ever considered accumulating dogs—which we did—I’d advise that your accumulation be of a similar stature—which ours isn’t—so as to concentrate the inevitable nose prints on your low windows, if not to a single pane, then at least to roughly the same elevation.

Stay well. 

Isn't it wonderful how beneath every white duck there are two gloriously orange feet.

It is Autumn. The air is crisp. The sky is clear, with not so much as a speck of bird to mar its blueness. 
   In lieu of clouds, we sit to watch the cows ...Josephine and I ...that move slowly across the adjacent hillside, as if weightless, nudged along by the slightest of unseen breeze.

In the corner of her playpen, as far from the Maple tree as she can be, Josie is huddled in that tiny way she does when she is frightened and wants to be seen by nothing and no one other than myself. 

'What is it Jo?' I ask, leaving my work to go to her. 

'Monster,' is all she can squeeze from her shivers as I let myself in to the pen, 'Monster.' 

And it must be a fearsome monster, too, because I look, kick through the grass, and can't find a thing, and everyone knows the more fearsome the monster, the harder they are to see.




     

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.