Cooped up and Loving it

Now I spend most of my days at home, putting the finishing touches on Power Point lectures about Homo erectus or population genetics. It’s pretty wonderful. But some days my aloneness starts to mutate and I get a little freaked out about odd noises I hear outside, or when someone calls my secret landline in the middle of the day. But then...

It usually starts with a soft scratch-rattle on metal sound. Then I see their gently bobbing silhouettes. The pigeons love to spend time on top of my air conditioner. This explains the downy feather or two I sometimes find on my apartment floor. I am fully blossoming into a cooped up half-crazy New Yorker now - loving and appreciating the pigeons in a new light.

I am thankful for their visits, which punctuate days upon days spent in my head. I act surprised every time I see them, even though I know they come regularly. And they are so beautiful. Some with white streaks of tail feathers among the grey, others that indescribable mauve color combination which seems like a painter’s muddy palette that accidentally turned out gorgeous. They are so damn dirty and humble, and I bet they have no idea how pretty their own tail feathers look to the world. They shuffle and coo and fly back and forth between my air conditioner and the building across the street.

Yesterday, a few not-quite-spectacular clouds streaked the sky, and the sun cast an incredibly slight orangey-pink on them. Not an Instragam-worthy sunset, just one of those everyday skies. And against that sky, two pigeons perched on the top edge of a building, little grey beating hearts, investigating, resting, marching and then resting again.