Welcome to the City
Spring is in the air and animals are on the move.
I’m used to living in L.A. and Phoenix, where the term “wildlife” is mostly reserved for nightclubs. Sure there are animals in the suburbs but they tend to be pretty circumspect. The coyotes make an appearance every so often but usually you don’t see anything bigger than an opossum and those you usually only see when they’ve been ground into the road. Now I haven’t actually seen anything bigger than an opossum here yet, but God has told me to keep my eyes open.
So I’ve been watching. In my neighborhood there’s signs warning of deer crossing the road, but I’ve seen those signs in other places and found the signs to be a lot more common than the deer, so I’m hopeful but certainly not holding my breath. A little closer to home, there’s a stream that I cross on my way to work every day and the last few days there’s been a goose and maybe eight or so goslings playing around in the mornings. In that same area I watched a considerably smaller bird land on the sidewalk, pick up an earthworm and fly off again. It was nearly eight in the morning so I don’t know how early I should really consider that, but by my reckoning, for the first time in my life I’ve actually seen the early bird get the worm.
One last sighting was made by a coworker who snapped a picture with his pocket camera. It was in that same stream where I watched the goslings but a bit further along where it runs alongside my office’s parking lot. The picture’s a little blurry but not so much that you’d mistake it for a shot of bigfoot, instead it’s obviously a shot of a beaver, swimming along with it’s paddle-tail flat out behind. Now the suburb of Portland that I’m living in is a city called Beaverton. It’s kind of nice, for the first time in my life, to live someplace that has a natural and obvious derivation for its name. And not even a touch of irony to it, so the City of Angels can eat its heart out, as far as I’m concerned.
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