Art Heals: Birds.2

I woke up this morning to the sounds of chirping.  As I noted in a previous blog, the urban bird population has increased in either quantity or ubiquity, or perhaps both, since we are inside our cages looking out at them for a change.  Aside from seeing them on my daily walkathons,I am graced with hourly flybys across my street-facing 6th-floor windows.  Aerial ballets, and actually more often aerial combat missions, take wing over my balcony.  Wide-winged black Raptors, (well, probably crows) create turbulent vortexes to spin the little Cessnas (yes, OK, starlings) downward in a seeming death spiral that ends in a dramatic upswing just above the sidewalk.  Acrobatic Beechcraft (nuthatches—you are getting the picture) perform atmospheric choreography while red-bodied fighter jets streak their contrails across the sky. (Easy one—fill in the blank.)  Of course, the price of admission to these avionic exhibitions is the occasional fuel drop now that their tanks are filled to capacity with the annual springtime supply glut. But worth it, except for that splotch down the unreachable, uncleanable windowpane opposite my dining table. (6th floor, remember.) Never mind.   I’ll just squint and I won’t even see it.
So this morning I woke up to the sounds of chirping.  It was the batteries of my three smoke alarms all failing at once.  I forgot to change them when setting the clocks forward last month.
I offer Helen Zughaib’s “Spring Flight,” originally made to remind us of those people caged by oppression, yearning to fly free, but now equally apt in referencing the cages of isolation from which we ourselves wish to break free.