Those Things

Sunday morning. The fog, my favorite kind of weather, is lifting slowly. I am late. Unfortunately, not to an appointment. If it was an appointment I could make a call, apologize and ask for postponing my meeting. But today, I have a meeting with Nature. That one seems to be less and less forgiving.

Anyway, I still have about 20 minutes to capture some moments of stillness in the foggy setting. I bearly manage to set up my filming equipment when I hear frantic wing flapping and screeching. To my right two woodpeckers are wrestling with a couple of doves. The whole scene seems very dramatic. Mesmerized, I stand still watching the live performance.

Suddenly, I hear a child’s voice, “The woodpeckers are telling the doves to go away. It is their tree. They always do that. But I think it is ok for the doves to sit on it too. The tree is big enough for all of them. They can share.”

The words are registering slowly in my mind. There is a lot going on here. First, the visually stunning scene and then a second later, the narrator joins. I look to my left. About a 5-year-old girl is looking curiously at me with her big brown eyes. Her father is standing right behind her and also watching the bird-fight scene.

I ask the girl, “Do you know those woodpeckers?”

The child replies, “I often watch them. They always fight. And they are so loud. They really don’t care about that tree. They like the palm tree across the street much more. They just want to pick up the fight with the doves.”

I smile and think, “She sounds like a younger version of myself”.

Then I hear the girl’s father say, “Kids, huh? They have time for those things. I have lived here for 3 years and I didn’t even know that we have woodpeckers in the area.”

I think to myself, “What has happened to all of us? We all used to have time for “those things”. When did we lose the ability to see? Are we too busy for “those things”? Or maybe we are too grown up for them. Does it serve us any good?”