Snowy day: an essay

The weatherman said it wouldn’t be a significant snow event, just a 30% chance of a light early morning dusting. I hope he doesn’t loose his job.

It is a wet Arkansas snow, the temperature 34 degrees, just cold enough and humid enough for the snow to make it to the ground. It is piling up on fence tops, crawling over the edge of the patio, blanketing the grass, and bending supple young pines into obeisance. A baker’s dozen of small gray, brown, and black birds are bustling, busily snarfing up birdseed scattered on the concrete patio, barely out of reach of the snow. They are moving with the intensity of survival, their small round bodies poofed to roundness to insulate them from the cold.

Suddenly, every one is still. As if flash frozen, heads turned this way and that, not a feather, not a beak moves. Like the children’s game of Swing the Statue, each bird is captured in a pause frame of non-movement. I am captured by their pause and immediately aware of my own breath. I too, freeze my physical movements, but my mind is on full alert and busy with questions.
“A predator?”
“No, they’d fly.”
“Dead? Somehow poisoned?”
“No, they would fall over.”
“A moment of hibernation to conserve their small ball of feathered energy?”
“I don’t know.”
Why? Why is every one of them absolutely still? We are in suspended animation, the birds and I, suspended in a momentary flow of non-movement, a moment of being, doing, being for what seems like a very long time in bird time- a minute or so in human time.
A sparrow on the small white table finally moves and, with a very slow, deliberate peck, picks up a seed. She seems to be in a trance.

Stillness again.
No one else moves. The bird world is stalled, standing completely still.

After a few more moments, one on the concrete bobs its head, but slowly, as if the action feels foreign, new and unusual or maybe it is returning from an altered state of bird consciousness. Could they be awakening from a collective dream of sunny and warm breezes and abundant food? Or maybe they are participating in a collective dream so fearful it paralyzes the whole gathering?

Stillness again.

One by one, the birds begin to move, a head turned, a tentative step sideways. Slowly, an unseen force seems to seep through the group and, as its momentum increases, each bird is eventually affected. Within a few seconds of gaining group movement, they all lift away from the patio in one swoop and I am left with only the questions.