Running: by the birds

Goodness, I love spring.  I love the tulip bulbs blooming and the trees budding.  Most of all, I love that the birds are back.

I had a lapse in my running.  You know: illness and darkness and vacation… it added up to a few weeks with no miles on my feet.  As I age, I lose fitness so much faster (and regain it so much more slowly), and these last few runs have been hard.  The ease I felt in my long January runs was absent.  I am slowly clawing my way back to running.  To function.

But the birds are back, and each time I see one, I am inspired to go a little further.

• a house finch singing from the peak of my neighbor’s roof.
•  the pair of robins flirting in a budding apple tree.
• a flock of redwing blackbirds in the reeds and cattails.
• a hawk, sitting completely still on a stone wall.  Over my music, I could hear a frantic, repetitive keening that I thought was from him, but it was from the terrified prairie dogs he was watching.
•  a flicker, so pretty I tried to snap a photo, but he was long gone by the time I had untangled my phone from my pocket.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/And sings the tune without the words/And never stops- at all-

And sweetest – in the Gale- is heard/And sore must be the storm/That could abash the little Bird/That kept so many warm-

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land/And on the strangest Sea/Yet- never- in Extremity/It asked a crumb- of me.  –Emily Dickinson