My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
“If this isn’t nice, what is?” DK Photo: Baby Robins. 1pm. June 1, 2025. Stamford, CT. Thank you Barry and Cara Denison for sharing your beautiful finding.
It was during this time of great discomfort that she had written to the stranger on Reddit.
Dear Sir: I enjoy your posts. I am envious that you’ve found such a harvest of black locust flowers. I hear black locust emits a heavenly smell. But what do the flowers taste like? I have not seen any here at the 41st latitude. Where do you live?
Please forgive this intrusion from a stranger. After pressing send, she had moved away from her desktop. She hadn’t gotten to the kitchen sink before she heard a ping. She had a message on Reddit.
They taste like fresh spring peas drizzled with nectar. I eat them by the handful like popcorn. I live in Maine. Same latitude as Vladivostok and Manchuria. You?
“A bird’s bill is not insulated. Nor are its legs and feet. So all those vulnerability points tend to be smaller in species that winter in cold zones — scaled down as a result of the natural selection process across countless generations.”
Feathers are the first line of defense against weather, Mr. Sibley said in a recent conversation, and besides enabling flight, “they’re streamlining, waterproofing, windproofing, coloration — all those things.” And down feathers, the soft, fluffy kind closest to the bird’s body, he added, are “the most effective insulation known.”
Using tiny muscles where their feathers attach to skin, birds can raise and lower them, thickening the insulating layer around their bodies, he said, “like putting on an extra jacket or getting into a sleeping bag.”
Also thanks to feathers, a bird can tuck in its most vulnerable body parts, particularly overnight. Heads are turned so beaks can be buried into the shoulder-like scapular feathers atop a wing “to reduce heat loss and recycle warmth in the same way people do when breathing into cupped hands,” Mr. Dunne writes. By perching on one leg, the bird can pull the other up into safety, conserving more heat.
Another cold-defying strategy of birds is shivering on demand to raise their body heat — that’s what chickadees do to emerge from torpor.
Small birds lose about 10 percent of their body weight each night year-round while at rest…
4:00 a.m. I check the weather app: 18° F, wind speed 15 mph from the North, wind gusts up to 28 mph. Temperature feels like – 1° F. Winds from The Great White North, a reminder of Home. Add the presence of high tide, cloud cover of < 5% and there would be less-than-zero reason to be going out this morning, except one of the three requirements of a great morning trifecta being present, No Humans. Wally snuggles close, belly so warm, he snores. I tip toe out of the room, wood floors cold, body and bones resist, this Earth won’t stop spinning if I take the day off.
Last Night. Rachel asks if we would drive into the city to pick her up. Luggage, Sully, Christmas gifts, just way too much to haul solo on Metro North. The response was swift: Absolutely Not. Google Maps estimates ~90 minutes in both directions, if all goes well. Holiday traffic snarling. Tolls subject to surge pricing add to the misery. Now, why would anyone subject themselves to this? Well…It’s 8 p.m., and here I am, in the car, driving into Manhattan. Madness. 30 minutes to travel 30 miles. 60 minutes to navigate the last 10 minutes into Gotham. Think Mad Max in Thunderdome. Eastside highway traffic moving 55-70 mph, along NARROW, I mean a NARROW three lanes on something closer to a gravel country road than highway. Reach out your window and touch the yellow cab next to you. Reach out the passenger side, you’d be skimming the restraining wall of the East River. It’s less than one hour from bedtime, and here I am, bleary-eyed, hands clenching the steering wheel — the body knows, stomach cramps signaling high anxiety. I shift in my seat conscious of one errant move right or left and there is a pile up of massive proportions — followed by a 2 hour delay with cops, and accident reports. But, there’s something to prove here. Man-Child from small town Western Canada still has it — can make it on these tough streets of NYC. Cab driver behind me has his hand on the horn urging me to speed up, I’m going 60 mph. He passes giving me the bird, must be the Connecticut plates. I reciprocate with genuine kindness, turning on my high beams and tailgating him for the next mile or two, high beams flickering in his rear view mirror. Don’t mess with Country. He turns off at Exit 15. Still got it.Man-child.
4:30 a.m. I settle into my office chair. No longer reading the papers, nothing uplifting there. No longer following politics. I check the box scores. Check blog posts. Read another chapter or two, and then close my eyes reflecting on the drive into Manhattan, operating on < 5 hours sleep. “Yes, Lord, I am thankful today again for every reminder of how I have outlived my worst imagination. I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn’t.” — Hanif Abdurraqib
Other than that, there was no noise. Not a breath of wind, no birds flying. Around us pure white snow continued to silently fall. What a beautiful scene, I thought. It moved me, in a way. I was sure every detail would remain in my memory, until the moment came when I took my last breath.
2:30 am. Wally is restless, and his tossing and turning had wakened me (again).
I don’t know what pulled me to get up and look out the window. Murakami: “You wordlessly shook your head. But something had happened. I could pick up on it, the delicate sound of wings beating at a decibel beyond a human’s audible range.” And what a surprise it was to see snow.
Murakami’s words didn’t exactly capture my experience this morning with our first snowfall of the season, but it was nonetheless beautiful. The impact of global warming continues to haunt me. I do wonder if our grandchildren will get to experience the beauty of snowfall in winter.
As I rounded the turn on the home stretch of my walk back to the car, the wintry mix turned to heavy rain and the snow was melting as quickly as it had arrived. Murakami: “The days passed, the seasons changed. Yet days and seasons are but temporary things…Human beings are as insubstantial as an exhaled breath, and what they do in their lives is but a moving shadow.”
More photos from this morning’s walk can be found here.
Photo above was taken at 3:12 am. Snow mixed with heavy rain. 32° F, feels like 22° F, wind gusts up to 37 mph. November 22, 2024. Cove Island Park. Stamford, CT.
