resting

I sat in bed all morning, watching lines and vees and zigzags of birds as they flew -- inexplicably -- northeast, toward the Decembered hills that slope unevenly across my view and up into Canada, heedless of customs agents or the international borders neatly drawn on human maps. Slate grey gulls and umber geese, starlings so black they're almost blue, and ash-white swans.

The shades were drawn all the way up; I don't often do that. But the light... the light was special, today. I watched it move and change the shapes of things, sometimes with my eyes open, and sometimes with them closed. I sat and listened to music and did nothing, for once, with my hands. They lay folded in my lap, inert, quiet and compliant and deceptively still.