Baby bird season

The birds must be working very hard to get the "early worm" they wake me at 3:30 in the morning with their chirping.  I think the chicks must be asking for their middle of the night feeding as I remember very well, human babies were apt to do also. Maybe those bird calls that wake me are grumbling parents.  The Canadian geese that come to our lawn have been absent aweek or more, I'm sure they are tending to their young someplace near-by. In summers past they have occasionally brought the chicks to the yard, but not yet this year. 

This osprey is on a brand new (this spring) platform at the end of a funeral home's lawn. I didn't get a photo with the chick, but there was one and maybe more. A little further in today's walk is a second kettle pond -- we have them abundantly on Cape Cod.  We are so near sea level that any depression  is apt to fill with water and become a "kettle pond". -- there was a pair of swans and four cygnets.  Down at the beach where I walk areas are marked off limits for nesting piping plovers.  This abundance of baby birds is a part of the definition of spring. I don't know if it's the plovers or the sanderlings that fly overhead in hysterically shrieking circles when I am at all near those areas. I try to stay away, hysteria seems a bad state of mind for a parent whether male or female.

I'll See You In My Dreams

4:30 matinee on a beautiful sunny weekend and the Cape Cinema was almost packed to see "I'll See You in My Dreams."  Most of the audience were of an age to match the characters in the movie -- notably Blithe Danner, looking not a day over 45, and her three women friends all types -- stereotypes! -- of women who play bridge and gossip at a retirement community. I can usually count on better than average movies at the Cape Cinema (and I can count on seeing someone I know -- which I did). I was happy to run into Bob and Elizabeth and grossly disappointed in the movie.

The screenwriters pulled out every cliche and stereotype possible, were utterly without cleverness and the casting was so pat-ly stereotypical I couldn't beleive I was not watching a bad TV show -- at least TV usually has a group of writers and that insures some clever writing.  In short it was a horrible afternoon. Every stereotype about aging was on view, Blithe Danner's character had spent 20 years an idle widow living on husband's life insurance, in very fine style. She drank wine constantly, not at all referred to that she might be an alcoholic (how else did she say so slender!) As I think of it, even the wardrobe worn by Danner and was bad -- or do people really dress that way in California retirement villages?  Suddenly she was flirting with the pool guy and then just as suddenly a cigar chewing (but not smoking) guy gives her a rush, wants to marry her and then drops dead.That is the plot.

Since I do not have a television, I cannot say that people of this age and comfortable financial circumstances are or are not always shown as having empty lives and minds, but I suspect it is true. I suppose some of those women exist, I'm  very, very happy that the people I know actually have personalities, interests, lives that are meaningful.

A Wonerful Time of Year

What a wonderful time of year it is when the rhododendrons burst forth with their big blossoms, especially in a town where some of these bushes are 50, or even 100, years old, big and full and showing off like an aging movie star, more than ready for her close up. When the air is mild and the sky is blue and the trees all have tender young leaves, a drive in almost any but the newest developments is a pleasure. The big old lilac trees have just passed their prime and, like an aging spinster (now that is really a ridiculous terms in this day and age -- from a turn of the century (I mean 19th to 20th, not 20th to 21st) novel, the lilac and mauve of dying lilacs is sad, but they are replaced with the azeleas and those rowdy rhododendrons.  Soon the hydranngeas will replace them, pink or blue, depending on the acidity of the soil -- there are riots of them just as big as the rhodies.  And they will be followed after they have the three weeks of glory by the roses that will, in most cases, last the rest of the summer.

I am constantly amazed to find myself in such a beautiful environment.  Today is my birthday and I am prone to contemplation about where I am -- which is to say where I have "washed ashore" (as is the description for those not born here. Okay, yes, I washed ashore, but I have a small portion of my family who are real Cape Codders, my grandchildren are natives (although Noah just happened to be born in Nova Scotia) and my great-grandchildren have not only been born right here but have the background and genes of one of the original Mayflower settlers. That amazes me.  I have never planned my life, it has happened mostly by serendipity.