Life is a series of gifts which we sometimes receive with grace and joy, and sometimes we don’t, perhaps because we don’t recognize the gift at the time. As my daughter wends her way through her sixteenth year and looks forward to her seventeenth, I am dragged kicking and screaming behind her, not appreciating her efforts to develop self-reliance and independence and her desire to develop relationships beyond our family. So I am practicing my breathing and pretending calm; this is not unlike my experience of her arrival into this world!
Accordingly… I am also working on developing my own independence and self-reliance, and about time!!! Phil and I went for a drive Sunday, took the Old Independence Highway and then River Road on the route from Corvallis to Salem, one of my favorite backcountry drives. We were, of course on the lookout for birds, and had Minto Brown Island Park as one of our destinations for the day, a fabulous refuge and stopover for migratory flocks. We had not thought to check the weather report, and found ourselves driving through a crazy windstorm, branches falling, roads covered with debris, but we emerged unscathed and to our delight had a respite from the storm just as we arrived at the park. On our way there, in the midst of the storm, we saw 7 or 8 great blue herons standing in a field not far from the Willamette River. They are so georgeous, elegant, amazing to see. At the park, we saw an impossibly tiny green bird called a ruby crowned kinglet, Oregon juncos, a spotted Towhee, which I always call the tuxedo bird, it’s how I remember them, they look like they’re wearing a tuxedo, of course, two bald eagles sitting in a tree, robins, wrens and a fat red squirrel. After our walk we went on into Salem for a quick visit with my sister and her foster babies, and then headed home. To our surprise, just at the edge of Salem we saw four black swans on an open lot – are they someone’s pets, escapees or what? Not native, they are from the southern hemisphere, New Zealand, I think. They were so beautiful, and one of the hens had a bunch of tiny babies, called cygnets, they were just balls of fluff following her around! Further down River Road, to round out our day, we saw ostriches. What a delightful trip it was, and I didn't call home once!
