How does Mary Oliver always know how I feel? Like in her poem, “Starlings in Winter”:
“I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
I want to be improbable, too. I want to be unlikely. I want to be afraid of nothing. We’ve had days of blue skies and I’m grateful for that as I know colder, grayer days are coming. For now the leaves are gold and orange and there’s still a little green in the grass and the trees.
I’ve been seeing blue jays everywhere but none of the cardinals I had been watching last winter. I remember my grandma used to chase the blue jays out of the feeders outside her kitchen window because they would hog the seed from the smaller birds. I wish I could recapture the joys that winter held in my childhood, snow forts, sledding, my grandma’s warm kitchen, laying down in a bed of snow, hot and tired from a day of playing and thinking that I could go to sleep right there and never wake and be satisfied with all that I’d had.
