Bob-bob-bobbin’ Along
Robins have arrived in the snow. Not the kind of snow you can peck through or scratch away. Snow like a salt glaze, bluish white, pebbly and shiny and slick as glass. They skip and skid upon the unexpected hardness of early Spring. This is what the robins have arrived to.
They are not an avant-garde, not the hardy few. There are at least a hundred. They blanket the yard like the snow they prance upon, snow that fell here on the coast only in inches, then followed by hours of fine freezing hail. Where will they hide? In bushes without leaves? In trees with bare branches? What will they eat, these tuggers of worms when all the worms in the world are fast asleep? Even if the tiny treading footsteps of the birds would rattle them awake how could soft-bodied annelids, pushing and prodding and innocuous, crack that locked earthen door much less the icy hasp?
Between this yard (if you can call my tangle of underbrush a yard) and the next yard (which really is a yard - grass, trees, the whole catastrophe) is a row of feral privet bushes. Feral because if they’ve ever been trimmed it was not by me. True confession? I hate privet. I hate the way it smells, I hate the way it looks, and I was thinking just the previous afternoon what good those ugly blue-black berries could do if at the end of a long hard winter they were still there, dangling, a basket of stone fruit ignored by every hungry mouth to come this way all these starving months and days.
Until now. Because that is exactly what the Robins are doing here. They are eating the inedible.
It is not as if it doesn’t affect them. They stand dumbfounded on the snow, feathers bulging against cold and the apparent discomfort of what they have just consumed. It passes through them quickly or simply refuses to stay down. Purple stains spread against the whiteness. Yet, perched in the bushes or hopping between them they eat until there is nothing left, not a single berry. And the next time I look the robins have gone.
It is as if they have vanished or turned to some unsolid thing whisked on the wind, away. They are not on the road; They are not in the wood; None fly. At the edge of the salt marsh I pause and think perhaps like rats gorged on ratbane they have been driven to the river in desperate thirst, and drowned there. I imagine little packets of orange and brown feathers, Ophelia-like, limply floated in cloudy water tinted the violet of belladonna. None of which has happened. They are off to a deeper part of the forest likely just north of here. It is not illness but only the hour which carried them away, that universal hour, that vacancy just before sleep.
Nothing canoes the river, not human, not bird, not beast. The marsh is silent as a pillow. Inhaling, the air still tastes like winter but the robins show, You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.
© 2007 Mark Seth Lender
All Rights Reserved
