The sun is among the missing. Spring too has gone into hiding. It is only 37°. That screams winter to me. The wind is still here and is blowing the branches, even the tallest pine branches are swaying. My backyard is littered with pine branches. On some warm day I’ll haul or drag them into a pile to wait for a chipper. I have an idea for one of the straight branches lying in the way back of the yard. I haven’t been able to put up my bird feeders. All the branches close to the deck are dead or dying. They were where I hung the feeders. I’m thinking to buy long wooden boards, nail them to the deck then nail the branch to the top of those boards. I’ll hang my feeders from the branch. I miss my birds.

My mother had a small enclosed garden next to her house right outside the kitchen windows. A statue of St. Francis, the patron saint of animals, was her bird feeder. She’d put seeds in his outstretched hands. We used to watch the birds from the windows. The statue was surrounded by flowers. A small fence circled the boundary of the garden. One morning Maggie, my boxer, found her way pass the fence. She sniffed the flowers in her best imitation of Ferdinand and snorted at the seeds. I told my mother she had a giant bird at her feeder. She wasn’t amused.

When I was a kid, I started believing in magic. The fireflies glowing in the field below my house were fairies, kin to Tinker Bell. Gnomes lived in the woods in hollow tree trunks. I never saw them, but I was sure they were there. I used to jump over the railroad ties with the double OO’s. I was keeping my mother safe from a broken back. I knocked on wood. I knew Santa and the Easter Bunny were real. I whistled walking pass a graveyard. I used chants. Rain, rain go away is one I should be using now. Abracadabra was my favorite magical word. It didn’t work, but I didn’t stop trying. Sometimes my mother would tell me to use the magic word. Hers was not abracadabra or open sesame. It was far simpler. It was please, the universal magic word every kid learned. It always worked.