a moment in the day: crow

I'm weeding at the edge of the sidewalk, pulling the little sprouts and dropping them in my bucket. Periodically stopping to consult the pictures on my phone that I snapped with Stephen's instruction. A picture with a thumbs-down means that's a weed. A picture with a thumbs-up means leave it alone. You'd think I'd stop having to ask him all the time, but that would mean you don't know me very well.

I pull another, drop it in the bucket.

Down the sidewalk come a family, mother, father, toddler, so I grab up my bucket, my discarded sunglasses, my diggy thing, and move away. I skirt around the car to the side of the house where industrious volunteer shoots of euphorbia are growing in a crack at the base of the wall. I hunker down to wait for the family to safely pass.

It's changing my brain, I'm sure of it. After this time passes how long will it take before the sight of another person approaching doesn't automatically send up warning signals?

A crow flaps down and lands on the wire overhead. She turns her head and her beak blinks white in the sun.

Corvid, I think at her, you have no idea.

From around the front of the house comes the toddler's voice. "Bye-bye, doggie."

He must be looking through the window to where Nicholas is camped out on the back of the couch, waiting for me. I wait a little while longer, pulling up the renegade euphorbia sprouts. It's a beautiful, perfect, blue-sky day. I wonder if the air tastes sweeter, cleaner to the crow.

When I figure it's safe, I get up from the driveway and step out from behind the car to the front of the house only to see the little boy standing there on the sidewalk. Little scooter, bicycle helmet, he's still staring through the window at Nicholas. Beautiful, perfect, blue-sky innocence on his face. And then his mom calls to him from down the block and he runs to catch up.

The crow on the wire is gone. I take my bucket back to the edge of the sidewalk, sit down. Start back into pulling life up out of the ground.