Woodpecker (from First Fifty Words)
The other day as I waited in my car for the ice to thaw on the windshield, I looked out the passenger window to my right. My neighbor has a magnolia tree in his yard next to my driveway. On the trunk of that tree was a woodpecker.
He wasn't pecking. He was checking holes that he or some other woodpecker had already pecked for any new prey that might have shown up. I'm not sure how successful he was, because once my car thawed out and I put the transmission in reverse, he flew away. About that time I wished I'd had my camera with me to grab a picture of him before he flew away. He was absolutely beautiful.
I live in a part of the country that rarely gets below freezing. Birds come here in the winter to hang out, or at least stop by here on their way further south. As I sat there and watched that woodpecker I wondered how confused he must be. Confused about the cold. Confused about where his dinner was. After all, he's not used to all this ice around here. He may not realize that makes all the bugs dig in deeper - deeper in the ground or deeper in the tree. I hope he found something to eat.
posted by learningtowrite | 9:04 PM
2 Comments:
Hi ltw,
This is Virginia from First 50 Words. Before blogging, I used to do my writing practice in spiral notebooks. I have a stack about 2 feet tall of those suckers. Do you suppose I reached a million words.
I saw a piece of art in a gallery at Austin, TX, several years ago. It was a stack of bronzed pages from journals. The stack was about 3 or 4 feet tall. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
When Natalie Goldberg teaches writing practice with groups, she sometimes tears up her journal pages at the end of the class and passes out torn hunks of her writing practice pages to class members. I cannot tell you how much the people who attend her classes treasure these torn scraps of paper.
Our medium now is electrons, but the beauty of what we are doing is the same. Keep writing. :)
wow, I feel honored to comment after Virginia. Wow.
Anyway, glad you're back LTW. Thought maybe you'd relocated to a beautiful internet-free place like a lovely cottage in the south of France or something.
Good luck with your continued endeavor. Happy writing.
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