The Sky and Leaves as They Fall

On the first morning of autumn, on the first morning it really felt like autumn, with the sun low in the crisp air and the leaves scattered across the ground, I woke up to find a dying bird in my living room.

There are a lot of reasons there shouldn’t be a dying bird in my living room, and one of those reasons is that I’m bad at bird ID so I can’t even write about the damn thing in a satisfying way. I think it was a robin.

Another reason there shouldn’t be a dying bird in my living room is that the door to the porch was closed so it ought not to have been able to get in.

Another reason there shouldn’t be a dying bird in my living room is that we share our world with bird flu now, and we’re not supposed to really get too close to dead (or, presumably, dying) birds these days.

I threw a tea towel over it where it lay on the floor, donned a respirator, and gingerly carried it outside. I set atop some junk in my yard and watched the little guy breathe and blink. I swear I saw a tear drop down its face, but even as I saw that my brain told me I must not have seen such a thing—though later googling revealed that birds can, indeed, produce tears. Just likely not in response to emotion.

I came inside and washed my hands and decided my life wouldn’t be better served by panicking about illness right now. Ten minutes later, when I returned to the outdoors to walk my dog, the robin had ceased its breathing.

Welcome, autumn. Good thing I don’t put full faith in omens.

We haven’t reached any kind of consensus about how bad things are right now in America. Every person I’ve talked to has a different take on the current crisis. Some people are fully alert, watching the sky for signs of its falling. Others are keeping their head down, their eyes firmly on the path ahead of them. Others are writing tangled metaphors about all of this into their newsletters.

We can’t agree what’s happening right now, so every conversation I’ve had for the past few weeks has been confusing, on some level, for everyone involved. Is the sky falling or isn’t it?

The answer, of course, is that ...