Place where you are.
Jan. 13th, 2014 11:15 pmI don't usually go to the Garden on Mondays; I swapped Wednesday out because my supervisor's taken another position at a different institution, and while her last day's tomorrow, today was the going-away party. There was coffee and tea, some sort of bread pudding, and I brought scones. Most of the library staff came to it, and we all joked and talked and had a good time saying good-bye. It was the second-best part of the day, and happy as I am to get a new professional reference, I'll miss her.
The best part of the day was a wonderfully loud murmuration of starlings a hundred-some-odd strong flying around the grounds. They didn't all move in concert with each other, but groups of them of about twenty or thirty would fly from one tree to another, and another group would follow, and another, until they'd all left that first tree for somewhere new. Several trees each got their own little group, and I couldn't see if the starlings moved from one group to another the way the groups moved between trees. Mostly, what I saw were them flying overhead. I'd gone out walking, thinking to get some fresh air before more cataloging, and then they started chorusing in the tree right next to me, and flew off down the hill. So I followed them.
They didn't go very far - the trees in that part of the Garden, right in front of the library, are all fairly close to each other - so I took a walk around the coniferous tree plantings to get behind the starlings, and come back to them from the other side. When I got there, and they came back into my hearing, I looked around at the lack of shadows on the grounds, and took some time to take in the clouds. Gray all over the sky, marked by texture, herringbone ripples and sand dunes and sidewinder tracks, filtering the spectrum to low pinks and yellows around the sun. Starlings calling out, to communicate something that, to me, was just the sense and knowledge of being in place, then and there. To listen and take note.
The best part of the day was a wonderfully loud murmuration of starlings a hundred-some-odd strong flying around the grounds. They didn't all move in concert with each other, but groups of them of about twenty or thirty would fly from one tree to another, and another group would follow, and another, until they'd all left that first tree for somewhere new. Several trees each got their own little group, and I couldn't see if the starlings moved from one group to another the way the groups moved between trees. Mostly, what I saw were them flying overhead. I'd gone out walking, thinking to get some fresh air before more cataloging, and then they started chorusing in the tree right next to me, and flew off down the hill. So I followed them.
They didn't go very far - the trees in that part of the Garden, right in front of the library, are all fairly close to each other - so I took a walk around the coniferous tree plantings to get behind the starlings, and come back to them from the other side. When I got there, and they came back into my hearing, I looked around at the lack of shadows on the grounds, and took some time to take in the clouds. Gray all over the sky, marked by texture, herringbone ripples and sand dunes and sidewinder tracks, filtering the spectrum to low pinks and yellows around the sun. Starlings calling out, to communicate something that, to me, was just the sense and knowledge of being in place, then and there. To listen and take note.
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