blog 8 - urban nature through a window

     The streets are dark and damp from last night's rain. Cars splash over the road, wipers swiping back and forth, as a few people walk down the street with an umbrella or raincoat. The rain increases. The sky is gray, just a solid white-gray with no clouds. From my desk, I watch the trees across the road. A slight wind blows the highest tips gently back and forth. The bark is dark from rain. They stand on the corner of the block, in someone's yard, and I've never touched or climbed or identified them, but I've watched them for years.

     Straight across the street, behind the row of houses, there's a small stand of hundred foot conifers. In the late of winter, the branches droop and big clumps of cones hang around the tree. The tops move in the wind, and I think of John Muir climbing trees. My imagination floats through the window and out to the trees and rests among the pine cones, rests among the birds, and the squirrels running the telephone wire. Can you imagine the insecurity of a pine cone or a bird, or maybe it's faithful confidence? A single bird sits in the very top of the tree, grasping with claws, riding branch and wind, swaying an inch this way, an inch that way.

     From the comfort of my office, I watch the rain come down heavier. It looks cold, and water begins to drip from the telephone and electric wires. The trees are dark bark skeletons, but in a few months they'll bloom and fill. Spring leaves will change the color palette of the window and offer privacy from neighbors. The summer wind will rustle the leaves, and summer rains will keep the roots wet. By fall, though, when the chlorophyl degenerates and leaves turn to red, yellow, brown, someone else will sit in this apartment. With plans to move in June, small features of my current place come into focus. The trees have changed for four years, and the conifers have kept a steady appearance. Sunlight, rain, snow, and wind have availed the trees. There are days when branches are filled with birds, when their song fills the air.

    

Every morning, the sun rises above the trees. Every morning, it's different, brighter, darker, clear or obscure, red, orange, purple, never the same. It's only visual perception of light, it's only trees and birds and squirrels, rain and wind, but it's what fills my window. An evolving picture, a perpetually changing painting of one Squirrel Hill street, a part of my mind and memory—the city streets, the light poles, the electric wires, the grass and sidewalks, conifers and children, noisy cars and singing birds, the wind and snow, the changing leaves.