Mr UD is away at the Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies, La Kid is at her internship at Congressional Quarterly Press, and UD is at home in Garrett Park. It’s too hot to go outside. She has positioned her laptop in front of the kitchen windows because she wants to watch two yellow-shafted flickers feed their baby.
These beautiful birds look like this.
If you enlarge the image (click on it), you’ll see a bit of yellow under one of the bird’s wings. What the image doesn’t show you is the whole bird suddenly turning bright yellow when it flattens and shakes itself in the dirt while cleaning its wings.
UD can watch tons of robins and cardinals feed their babies. That’s nothing. The flickers are special.
After her dog died last year, UD cleared the fenced-in wilderness that had been his play area. She took out a lot of bushes and weeds, cut back on ivy, relocated azaleas. She created a path and threw down mulch.
In a hidden corner, she placed a black chaise.
Years of overgrowth and a surrounding of mature trees make the place very shady, a private little garden wrapped in green. As UD cuts back on it more and more, she realizes what she’s got, what she’s wrought, is a meditation space, a zen oasis.