Storms and Animals

Urban Bird's Nest Earrings

Sitting at the traffic light.

Look up.

Birds.

Birds sitting on a wire.

Where do they go after work?

Home.

Urban Bird’s Nest. 

About 3 years ago, we were in the path of Hurricane Ike.  Houston got a pretty good wallop by old Ike and while our house was left intact, many homes and trees weren’t. 

It was an experience.  It had been along time since I’d been through a storm like that, and never with animals.  Funny how animals make you think about things differently.  My instinct (questionable at best) was to hunker down in our “roomy” closet, positioned nicely inside the “big” bathroom, and so buffered by rooms on all sides.  In our case, this meant 2 humans hunkering down for what promised to be all night with 2 old dogs in a 5 x 6, windowless, ventless, cave—the usually closed-off catch-all for dirty clothes and smelly shoes.  Get the picture?

Still, it seemed like a good idea so we ousted the unnecessaries, cush-ed up the floor, pillowed out the walls, and began to hunker down with “the boys”.  After a brief  barrage of unbelievably strong and sustained winds—we were literally only into this thing about 15 minutes—the power went out.  The fan stopped blowing, the dogs began panting, and then drooling, and that was that:  we retreated from the relative safety of the closet to the relative air quality of the bedroom.  Yes, the bedroom was risky as airborne debris from God-knows-what furiously pelted the windows, but, as you know, sometimes you have to choose the lesser of two evils….

Focus, f-o-c-u-s……….So the point of all this nostalgia is that one of the scariest moments of my life (albeit after the fact) made me think about animals: wild animals, feral cats, birds, lizards, homeless dogs, squirrels.  Where do other living things go for shelter and security from huge, nature-crushing storms?

So, 3 years go by and I’m driving home one day; needless to say, all of this serious thinking had worn off.  I looked up and noticed all these birds on the power lines above.  At every traffic light, there were wires and birds.  Sometimes there were a lot of birds and sometimes only one or two.  What if there were none?  Which reminded me of something I heard on the radio from a guy who had just survived a tsunami:  He said, “All the birds were gone.  We knew there was something coming because all the birds were gone.”  Which made me think, what if I look up one day and there are no birds? 


Where do they go?

Ingredients:

Cut Aluminum

Copper

Sterling Silver

Imagination