Plastic Owls & Cloud Laundry

Fall sky, sky fall in November,
Fall down
In open lap, spill over breathless toes,
Rain of laughter, surge of wind,
Layered clouds,
Lying hands heavy over a many
Mooded sky.

A yellow cloud graces my garden of sky – the speck that sits on the outside of our door glass, over the arthritic alley fence, the storied houses and chattering tree skeletons beyond.

I love that yellow cloud, love even more my November sky. She’s volatile, yes, and inexorable. And today I felt breathless, engulfed in her many layered clouds, like shadows of a woman’s heart. They stick at me, layered like piled laundry and fresh. Scented with the dew of fall, the thick almost-cold of approaching winter. My clouds, the deepest layers bright and cottony, like over-sized men’s undershirts. Some tinged gold and brassy yellow where work stains wore hard. And lying atop are the socky clouds, purple with her shades of blue, gray and angered. Whisps that are lost, they’ve gone astray and left their matches in a dank fortress over the mountains.

The sun frets her low rays over earth, claiming what layers of gold she still can before early evening folds her curtain down. And then seconds later come the drops. Big and thick, yogurt rain – falling in dallops and tablespoons like lazy footwork on my windshield. Slurp, slurp, suck the wiper-straws, thirsty, thirsty, ever thirsty for more.

Our neighbor squirrel has stopped outside the glass doors for a visit to search out the compost. And now I offer him nuts and dried fruit from my hand. He comes close, within inches, but will only take my offering from the ground, perhaps because he can sense my own silly fear of being bitten. Last month, we left the back door open for fresh air and he trounced in and clambered up on the piano, quite shocked at his own skill as he ran, terrified, from key to key.

And November birds – why do they intrigue me as they do? Last week, I stopped to watch a gull smash a crawfish against a cement block, cremating him with fireless force. Yesterday, I stood at a dock over the Sound to gawk shamelessly at a lined mass of them standing on an island of rock not far off the coast. I was close enough to see the white of their feathers smudged pink by the wind raging between each fragile plume. They refused to huddle, just stood in a line, proud beaks knotted up against the unforgiving sky. This afternoon, pigeons beckoned me from their streetlight perch, standing erect in an even spaced line like so many blue-green gargoyles.

They are my first morning greeters. 5:33am, I hope for a red arrow before curving onto Aurora to greet my morning team, huddled close in the window wells of Aurora Suzuki. There must be splashes of whitewashed paint drowning the tops of the large S, U, Z, because my friends have inhabited that space for years and surely left their mark. On wintery afternoons when the sun sets early in the sky, I watch them hoarding the last moments of gold on the telephone wires before retiring, one by one, to their wind-sheltered walls. I always guess wrong at which will be the last to go.

Two months ago, I noticed that perhaps the manager had grown tired of their dusty feathers and window waste smears, and had hung three plastic owls from the roof overhang by string to scare the pigeons from their home. My heart dropped and I considered how I could convince the pigeons that those owls were false and to fear no harm. How happy I was when I saw my pigeons in the same window wells only days later, and I felt a sort of valiance, as if I’d been avenged against the wicked store manager who clearly did not know who he was driving away from home.

Where do I hang my owls, and who do I drive from home?

Lord, open my window wells wide. Give me the gift of open arms, an open home, an open table. LORD, “Give me Your tired, Your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of each teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp up” toward November sky!