Bluebirds in the House

It's the height of spring in Atlanta.  Every day is flooded with extraordinary beauty about which to write.   From the early Yoshino cherry blossoms falling like snow on every warm breeze, through the daffodils and grape hyacinths, the magniflora camellias, the yellow carolina jasmine and the intoxicating starburst blooms of the evergreen clematis, to the extravagant bursting forth of the pink and white azaleas and flowering dogwoods the city over.  It's an intimidating state of affairs for an amateur nature writer.

That's not even to mention the ubiquitous mating behavior of every species of returning bird.  And the birdsong, my god, the birdsong.  The most joyful of all, for me, is that bluebirds are nesting again in the copper-roofed house.  I've taken up sentinel duty to prevent the tiny rapacious house wrens from chasing them off this year, as they have done the past two years. The wrens have not yet returned, but when they do, I'm ready for them.

The trouble with trying to capture this flood of spectacular beauty in print, aside from keeping me from writing for three weeks, is that it tends to make it sound ordinary.  There is positively nothing ordinary about spring in Atlanta.  The irony is that I'm more driven to write about the slow and the common.  An everyday kind of slow observation has the effect,  for me, of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary---like giving the voiceless a voice.  I'll just have to trust that the spring burst of Atlanta can speak for itself.

In the meantime, here's a shot of madam bluebird, speaking for herself in the azalea thicket.  Click once on the photo to see her and the azaleas more closely.  dkm