Matinee Performance

        There was snow last night. It didn't amount to much. Barely made it to my shoe tops. It painted the trees white. Between the noises of the occasional cars I hear the rhythm of the drops as the white changes to water. The conductor maintains a steady pace of drops in the downspout on my right.  A breeze blows trills across the top of my parked car and on the driveway. They are upper register of the orchestra. The low strings, cello and bass, lie in the snow below the trees. The low rumble of an eighteen-wheeled bassoon crescendos with the tubas and tympani of a jake-brake half of a mile away from here.

        

Dad thought studying music was a waste. “Whata you gonna do for money,” he’d say. My father always thought about the future – or dwelt on the past. The minute he was living in was squeezed dry. I’m sitting on a stone bench he made. A solid, practical thing. He complained and paid the college bill anyway. I talked myself into switching to math after a year. He never said he was happy, but he not once complained about that choice. Now I can estimate the weight of what I shoveled this morning while I ponder the music in the air.

         Three cardinals are in the nearly bare branches of what remains of a tree my neighbor got bored of cutting down. The bright red identifies them as males. I’ve never seen male cardinals together. I am trying my best not to make a silly joke about pope picking. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions and I have a lot of them. These birds camaraderie or at the very least mutual tolerance is surprising. They are probably the sons of a bird so aggressive he spent four summers attacking his reflection in our dining room windows. I called him Il Trovatore when I began to think the crash of keratin on glass, which punctuated birdsongs at dawn, was his version of the Anvil Chorus. I’d see his Leonora admiring her mate’s bravery from their nest in a nearby tree and sing her soft aria. I didn’t appreciate his bravery in quite the same way. I put pictures of snakes and owls in the windows to dissuade his unrelenting attack. He’d pause for an hour or a day, martial his courage and throw himself against the threat. I felt the anticipation the time after the last hiccup until April the year he didn’t return. The reason for my unease wasn’t clear until I saw cadinals flying into the bushes two houses away.  I didn’t know if it was our troubadour and his Leonora. I can barely tell kinds of birds apart let alone identify individuals of the same species. Just the same, I wondered if he abandoned us for less threatening windows. I’d rather it be that to think the cold or another creature’s hunger ended. Maybe there is a one-eyed owl or raggedy-eared fox wandering the neighborhood that’s lost the taste for cardinals after a meeting with him.

         Six hundred pounds give or take. That was the weight of the snow I moved. In case you were wondering.