After several inside days, coming back out to the patio felt a little like returning to a place that had been carrying on perfectly well without me. The first evidence was hanging right in front of me, the feeders needed to be filled. While I had been inside listening to the rain and waiting for better patio weather, the birds had apparently continued showing up.
And today, they were busy. They moved between the feeders and branches, sometimes sharing a perch and sometimes waiting their turn from the tree above. A few disappeared into the leaves where I could hear them long before I could find them. Looking at an empty feeder suddenly felt less like another little chore and more like proof that this place remains alive even on the days I am not sitting here to witness it.
What the photographs cannot capture is the sound. I wish you could hear them right now. Their voices drift through the air from different directions, some close enough to distinguish and others coming from somewhere beyond the trees. Every so often the individual songs seem to disappear into one larger sound, the kind of ordinary neighborhood chorus that is easy to overlook until you sit still long enough to notice it.
There is something comforting about knowing that they were here during the inside days too.
The patio does not become quiet simply because I am not sitting in my usual place. Birds still find the feeders, squirrels still investigate whatever might be available, leaves keep changing, and whatever lives beyond the edge of the yard continues moving through its own days. I miss some of it, probably most of it, but today there were empty feeders waiting to tell me that the stories continued while I was away. So I filled them again.
Now I am sitting on the patio listening to the birds sing, watching them return one after another, and wondering what the rest of this patio day might bring. Maybe Stella or Stanley will wander through the puddle, maybe one of the green herons will appear again, or maybe somebody entirely unexpected will become today’s story. But they do not have to.
After several days inside, blue sky, a chair on the patio, feeders full again, and birds singing from the branches feels like plenty. Sometimes the first visitors of the day do not have to be extraordinary. Sometimes they simply remind you that you are back. And today, that is enough.
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