Oh, I'm such a slacker. Things have been getting crazy, with Kevin moving and getting ready for the big grad school move, so I've allowed myself to be lazy with the writing. I've got a lot of ideas bouncing around but haven't put any of them to paper. I'm trying to get better though, so, here we go.

As I was driving home to NH the other day I got to thinking that I haven't written about Kevin in awhile. He's been in a lot of my writing, but nothing about him since ... well, really since right after I moved to Montana. So I wanted to change that, because the biggest pieces of the backdrop are the most important and they shouldn't be ignored just because they're everywhere.

Anyway, of course I can't just write about a subject, it must be masked by other subjects. So this one is about Birds. I was thinking about calling it The Thing With Feathers but that would just be too... something.

Birds, part one

The first thing I do when I wake up now is to topen the window directly behind our bed. I yank up the flimsy white metal blinds, and hold my breath with the strain of hauling the frame up, leaving flecks of purple paint on the sill. Flopping back down on to his empty pillows, I take in the days first breaths of Ithaca air, humid and sun-streaked and check the level of the bird feeder.

Just a few weeks before he left, we finally found a shephard's crook on which to hang his new bird feeder. We brought it home and found the perfect spot, wedged between our neighbors' fence and our bedroom window, two feet wide and not our soil. When you rent an apartment but you live inside the safe walls of a four-year relationship, you find ways to make any land belong. We wouldlay in bed on Saturdays and stare, waiting for the holy grail, the impossibly tiny flying visitors who would flutter in to crack seeds with their yellow beaks. He would identify them for me, by their colored marking, red and yellow and grey streaks in their wing feathers, even knowing how old they were, but I would mostly just watch him, his wide eyes focusing on their details, waiting.

...