December 17th

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 Dear Diary . . . 

     I haven't written in awhile. Today is the day to begin again. 

     It's a beautiful day for mid-December in Kansas City. It's a balmy 54⁰ at 2:44 pm. I made a point to take Heisenberg, my sweet little dog, for a nice walk today because tomorrow that's probably not going to happen. Apparently, the winds from Hell will be blowing around here. On our walk, I "ooohed" & "aaahed" over 2 hawks I saw. I am always looking for hawks. I saw a Sharp-Shinned Hawk up in a tree on the north side of 38th Street almost to Walnut. He or she was singing the song of their people & eyeballing the buffet of sparrows in a barren hedgerow across the street. Winter is so brown around here, that it was easy to see the beautiful red Cardinal fly in to join the sparrows. I would like to think that all of them escaped being dinner. There is a house right on that corner that was built in 1895 and has gargoyles on the chimney. The gargoyles do not frighten the hawks. Whoever lives in that house puts birdseed & black-oiled sunflower seeds out for the birds that stay in town for the winter. What can I say but that the hawks are intelligent. They have, sadly, figured out where the eating is good. 

     On our way back home, after Heisenberg & I were across the gauntlet that is the crosswalk on Main & 39th, I saw a larger hawk fly into a tan-stick tree on 39th & Baltimore. I walked Heisenberg up so that I could ogle the hawk (I could see it was a Cooper's Hawk) from a relatively close distance right under the tree. It was so beautiful. Beautiful things . . . Creatures  . . . Are ephemeral. I looked down to see what Heisenberg was up to and, when I looked back up, the hawk was gone. That's how fast a Cooper's Hawk, with it's long, pivotable tail, can move. Sometimes, they don't fly so much as they dart and dive-bomb some sad, unsuspecting songbird. 

     Up in St. Paul, Minnesota, my sister turns 60 today. She is the last of us four siblings to join the "60something Club". Our parents are both gone and we are all now officially old. Not that long ago it seems, we were young kids growing up in the 1960s. I remember playing "Kick-the-Can" on the Homewood Place cul-de-sac on summer nights and challenging each other to run barefoot across driveways made of sharp black rocks. I was young then. I wasn't even aware of hawks. 

      I feel like I should tie these 2 disparate subjects, seeing hawks in Kansas City and 60th birthdays in St. Paul, together in conclusion somehow but can they even really be compared and contrasted. I feel overwhelmed focusing on that. Accepting the randomness of it, helps me move on.

Dear Diary - thank you for listening to me today. 

Sincerely,

Anne

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