Happy Friday the 13th

A hint of dampness entered the air last evening, and gradually clouds formed, the moon became vague, the leaves of the sourgrass began to sparkle with dewdrops as fine as dust. One of the cats became eager to go out. When I opened the door for her, I heard rustling in the wild plum bushes, then the soft clop of hooves hurrying on the pavement. I had disturbed several deer, and they passed into the yard of the corner house where they triggered the motion sensing lights. I could see them silhouetted then, the rays of light turning the thin haze of fog about them into halos. The inquisitive cat went to sniff the ground the deer had trodden, and I watched the small herd depart the circle of light. Just then, the calls of another flock of migrating birds rang out, soon followed by the sound of their wings. The temperature has dropped since last night, but the birds are undeterred. They continue their flights northward, suggesting that the coming rain will be more spring-like than wintry. I am inclined to trust their instincts, and suspect that the remainder of the season will be mild. Birds are apt to be smarter than people who make up silly tales about groundhogs.

Birds are apt to be smarter than me, too -- or, at least, smarter at bird-things than I am at some of the things I do. For example, I ran across an interesting art-oriented web site the other day which I have been meaning both to revisit and to link from this journal. The particular page which I first discovered there was in the architecture section, but they have other works as well. I was going to post the URL now, but I just discovered that I can't find it. I'm still learning my way around the new browser, and thus still losing track of things. (Opera, it turns out, doesn't display URLs which you have bookmarked with the little javascript drop-downs the way IE does.) Ah, well. I'll have a better time hunting it down after I've had some sleep.

Update: Found it. It is The Digital Imaging Project, a collection of 10,000 images of architecture and sculpture. No time for me to explore it now, though. I see a hint of rose touching the eastern clouds, and I must sleep.

Evening Rain

Sometimes, the sound of soft rain reminds me of distant applause. It has died down, now. The event must have ended, the crowd dispersed, leaving the auditorium empty and dark. All I hear is the faint trickling of the downspout draining the last of the roof's burden of water, and a steady drip striking some small pool. Maybe this storm had only that one brief evening performance in it, and the remainder of the night will be only this quiet damp. Still, the clouds have not broken up, so there might yet be further entertainment. No thunder and lightning, I think; I sense no such energy in this air, but only a softness that is like being brushed by the petals of cold flowers.