The warmth is flirting with the air around here. So I pulled up a series of stories I wrote a year ago in Washington Square, during the blushing moments of last year's springtime. So have a read, and then cross your fingers that the warmth will get a little more tenacious sometime real soon.
Feather artwork by TheClayPlay at Etsy.
She was shushing the birds.
"Shhhh! Shhhhhhhhh!!" She hissed at them, jumping up to shake the branches of the poor tree where they perched. I could hear the chirpy chirp chirp of the park birds – the slightly squeaky ones that are constantly set on "repeat" and chirp and chirp and chirp with an uncanny volume, being such small, handful-sized avians.
It wasn't a large tree but then, she wasn't a large woman, squat and tiny, your stereotypical Italian matron, assiduously engaged in dictatorial peacemaking (as Italian matrons are wont to do).
Not being tall enough to grab a good hold of a branch, she clutched at a few leaves from a low-hanging bough, then furiously rattled it.
"Shhhh!!!"
As I approached down the brick-laid sidewalk, I heard her say, if not directly at me then certainly for my benefit, "They are fighting! Why they fighting? Stop fighting! Shhh! Why you fighting?"
I couldn't place the broken English; perhaps she really was an Italian matron, transported here to the streets of Philadelphia from some small sun-drenched town in the Tuscan hillsides (where the entire cypress tree, perhaps, is much easier to rattle by simply shaking the bottom-most branches) with the sole purpose to quiet these argumentative, voluble birds.
As I walked away, I couldn't help but think, perhaps this woman has an intimate and scientifically-informed knowledge of the nature of park birds. Perhaps those chirpy handfuls are actually engaged in an unnatural blood-fued battle over the territory of a small tree bough. Perhaps she isn't crazy.
Then I thought, perhaps she really isn't crazy. Perhaps she yearns for peace and amity just like most of the rest of us; she's just less guarded about working for it.
In today's warring world, is peace really for the birds?
Anthropologie Gilded Bird prints. Yes please.
Like a modern aviary icons.
