Danny and the Elephants!

I was in the cottage, not the large part where Stella does her painting and flower arrangements, but rather the smaller space in the back where we keep the garden tools and general supplies.

Stella wanted some cypress mulch to put on one of her flower beds, and I needed the wheelbarrow we keep stored in this back part to get a couple bales of the mulch. Just as I grabbed the handles, I heard a sound, a beautiful sound.

A bird was singing nearby, close nearby.

I turned.

The sound seemed to be coming from near the rollup door at the entrance of the tool room. The room is small, but not that small, perhaps fourteen by fifteen, but we do put it to good use and keep a lot of things in it.

If the song came from inside the room, the singer was not obvious.

Yet the song was so close.

I stood still, worried that some bird may have come in and started a nest inside. Not wise, since when I closed the roll down door, it would be trapped. I stood in the soft early morning dark light of the room, looking toward the bright sunlit entrance.

Listening.

I have learned to recognize many of the land birds since coming to the farm five years ago, but I have not been able to identify them by their songs. Perhaps because of the change in the surroundings.

In Mississippi, at least along the beach, mocking birds make strident sounds and always seem to be fighting off intruders or themselves. Here they seemed by their songs to be more serene.

The song I was hearing today seemed familiar, one that I’ve heard before, but I couldn’t name who its singer could be.

Outside the early morning sun was shining.

It was a clear, bright day.

There had been a very brief shower just before the day’s dawn and the reflected miniatures of the sun’s image in the droplets of water on each of the blades of grass in front of the rollup door made the grass sparkle.

Yet I saw no bird.

I stood still listening. It had to be close.

When nothing happened, I walked quietly to the entrance of the room and, standing on the wooden ramp in the morning sun, looked to the right and then the left.

My song bird was not on my right but on my left, perched on a small limb of the red bud tree.

He was a song sparrow and he was looking at me.

He had stopped singing.

I was unbelievably close, less than three feet. Lit by the morning light, I could see every feather; I could see his beak, his small bright eyes...

Seconds passed.

He looked at me and I looked at him.

He raised his leg up for a moment and then put it down. A nervous motion, but still to my surprise, he did not leave.

Sitting there, looking…

Then he opened his beak... I was so close … and sang his song.

We walk down many roads; we do many things. But there are moments in all of this that last only seconds; moments that you remember all your life. This bird on this sun drenched, early summer morning was giving me one of those wonderful moments.

An alto sound, absolutely clean… no back tones, just the song itself, loud, crystal clear.

For one brief golden moment, he announced his presence in the morning air.

Then he stopped and stood still looking at me for a few measured seconds more.

He lifted his leg up and down one more time then stopped completely and then, seemingly satisfied, he flew off.

I watched him go and soon lost him among the trees. I didn’t mind. Turning, I went back in the tool room and got the wheelbarrow. Turning it about, I wheeled it out of the tool room.

I was getting the cypress mulch for Stella, but what I was really doing was listening in my mind to the silver song the song sparrow had sung to me.

Years ago, a large storm destroyed our Mississippi beach home.

We moved, settling on a desolate small farm in in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania that my wife had grown up in as a child. It was a drastic change from what had. But that we realized was gone, truly gone. We could not go back.

We slept on the floor of the old wooden farmhouse and worked hard at restoring the farm to its former self. We were not young and that made what we were doing all the harder. We kept at it. Along the way we had many adventures; some funny, some not. Slowly the farm paid us back.

Years have passed, but finally we find ourselves living amid the beautiful bloom of the farm’s former self. We have no animals; just fruit trees, berry bushes, and the like.

Looking about, we found at last, we were happy with what we had done. We find we have brought life to the farm, a life that included the farmers around us, the wildlife, and the town people. The true short stories you read in this book describe the wondrous life we now have living on a rural farm in the highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania.