Beautiful morning

Our house is not in a pretty neighborhood. Behind our house is a state building that used to be a small hospital. Now it is where the water police park their boats. Around the corner, a couple blocks down is the military hospital, which has a large expansion project under construction. We hear trains at night. And although we have a view of the Back Bay to the north, it is marred by the high rise casino a mile down the street and the highway bridge that cuts across the bay to connect our little peninsula to the mainland. That view wouldn’t matter so much, if the neighborhood weren’t suffering from a decline because insurance rates went crazy after Katrina. People can’t keep up with their bills and their yards and exteriors. Those who can afford to move have, and those who can’t sell their homes rent them to the kind of people who keep pit bulls for pets.

But this morning on my run I saw:

blue jays
green herons
white egrets
tawny killdeer or plover
brown pelicans
black cormorants
gray mourning doves
diving seagulls and terns
chattering mockingbirds
cavorting swallows
and a pair of redheaded woodpeckers making a nest.

There’s also a pair of osprey who nest nearby. Sometimes we see them circling when we’re swimming in the neighbors’ pool.

Then I saw a baby opossum and its mama, playing possum. For the first time I thought they looked cute, their faces frozen in mirror images of each other. Their ruse worked; I didn’t attack.


Finally, in a vacant lot, I saw what I thought at first was a muskrat. It, too, seemed frozen, so I detoured over to get a closer look. As I neared, it slithered into motion – it was actually a mink! A limp indicated it had either an injury or rabies to spread to the pitbulls.


The critters all are feeding on the ripe mulberries and low growing blackberries that are ripe right now in the vacant lot behind the military hospital.

Beauty is where you look for it.