Eaton Hamilton

I have been very carefully watching and listening to the spring bird life around my new house.  We are surrounded by green, here, from swishing bamboo to cherry trees leafing out after spreading their white arms over the back garden, and the birds, now welcomed with seed and suet, are enthusiastic about full bellies at nesting time.  I’ve seen the usual suspects–the striped finches, of course, who eat right at the feeder, but also the fat-belled chickadees and the ground-pecking black-headed juncos.  The suet is attracting bush tits, startlingly noisy for creatures barely bigger than popcorn.  Up in the trees I can hear the sharp calls of flickers, drawn, no doubt, to suet here and perhaps further away.  There’s a cadre of cats living here, and all of them, thank goodness, are too elderly or uninterested to do anything at all to end a bird’s life.  Even my Zoey, who, having once been wild, used to just need to extend a paw into the air and a bird would fly right in.

I love the unreasonable happiness and hope of springtime in Vancouver.  The magnolias are pooping out just down the street, but I stop anyway and stroke the waxy petals thinking of a photographic series I once made of them.  A neighbour has a brilliantly lush vine of Clematis armandii, and each time I pass I fill my head with its subtle delicious scent.  The temperatures are climbing.  The birds are busy.  The bulbs thrust lustily up.  Last year, I was so grateful to be given a cutting from a lilac shrub I swooned over–a late, dark-purple double–and this year it has a floret.

I think only good luck can follow all the wonder and awe I daily feel here.