Quaking Aspens, Failed Chicks

This afternoon I sat in my living room and watched the quaking aspen outside my window. Facebook reminded me this morning that I've been a homeowner three years, and the thought that I was now ten percent owner of the structure gave me pause. I suppose if you rationed it out, that would be equivalent to one of the bathrooms or maybe the front porch. The bank owns the rest and I'll likely never stay long enough, either in it or alive, to be full owner. The lifestyle choices you make, I suppose.

A has been out of town with Uly for the past week, due to be out another two and I've had to fend for myself. It's been a strange trip, one in which the substances have flowed and my consciousness has become seriously altered, my body victim to those changes in the long run, like some Dune universe guild navigator given over to the spice gas chambers' enhancement. The things around me that I notice, self included, seem in their infirmity to not exist in any objective manner. The simulation reality persists, and fake or not, it's the best jam I've got. So the groove maintains.

After I completed the chores I'd set for myself today - laundry, dishes, weeding my home garden, bed made, package sent, lawn weed whacked, plants watered, floor swept, cats fed - I biked to town in the fade of a serious elevation. On the way, in my neighborhood, was a bearded man mowing his lawn while cradling his toddler, a girl who watched his workings with a great seriousness. I ventured on to the community garden and weeded the patch for which I had obligated, then biked on to the arboretum, past a couples' tennis match and tree swallows acrobatting in the overhead grey. The arboretum isn't under new management as I had feared, and a recently expanded easement offered access to the familiar arboretum sign that had been uprooted from its previous location. There was a candy wrapper from the recent Colony Days parade near the lilacs and I took this with me on my walk through the trees only to deposit it in the city offered trash can in the new parking lot.

The chickadees laid a clutch in our birdhouse the second year running. I don't know if they are the same birds as last year, but I was anticipating hearing the brood grow in body and instruction, their parents piping out the "dee dee dee dee" staccato that I took to be the chickadee word for food when the parents returned to the nest. The adults had abandoned the house after the chicks inside had been silent for some time. Yesterday, I opened the birdhouse and cleaned out the nest. This year's birds had outdone the last year's construction and the nest was a four inch high brick of mixed bedding, mostly lichen, with a deeply recessed hollow where the eggs had lain. The chicks there were shriveled raisins of bodies, wings splayed and face down. I wept like a bitch.