like Christmas ornaments, promising more.

Fog shrouds the landscape allowing only glimpses of the still pond, the dew glistening grasses, and now and then, a peek of fuscia or golden brown-eyed daisies shows through, like Christmas ornaments, promising more.

I am drawn to the scene, the fog like heavy drapes to be burnt off in an hour, so I shower and dress quickly to get breakfast ready. There’s something about breakfasting here with only a wide picture window separating me from the wakening world.  A swoop of barn swallows converge on the grassy knoll guarded by the four-story rugged barn – a grandfather of barns with the roof falling in on what was once a busy milk house leaning in on the left.  Windows lend a glance into the past, and I watch my father-in-law dead these twenty years measure and cut long oak boards for a china closet.  As I peer more deeply into the darkness I see him leading black and white Holstein cows from their stanchions  - a little boy in bib overalls following and slapping the nearest cow on her flank…I hear the boy yell, “Giddayap.”

 Wisps of straw filter down from the upper levels where tractors and plows, combines and harvesters appear to have parked themselves on the first floor up, green Olivers, red Massey Ferguson, and orange Allis Chalmers.  A ladder leads to the upper levels, the hay mow where rectangular bales stacked floor to ceiling mark the hours of sweat poured into their transport and where boys were wont to play of a rainy day.

 But my visions are memories now, and the only movement comes from feral black and white cats and barn swallows who seem to have called a conference this morning. In a circle there in the wet grass, they converse and make decisions because suddenly one must have pounded an invisible gavel and in concert, they dance into the sky pirouetting to land on the barn’s peaked roof.  It looks like a flying class with one, two and then three of the smaller birds taking off to the left, sketching ever greater circles into the sky and then returning, their pointed tails and wings like the ends of silk scarves turning to the right and settling on the edge from which they had launched themselves.  Over and over they draw this pattern in the air until, I think they are either tired or bored, and they retreat to the top of a sumac leaning out from the barn’s foundation looking ever so much like the Christmas birds I pose on my tree. I imagine them chattering away, rehearsing whose flight was the smoothest, whose the most graceful, and all the male birds bragging about whose was the bravest and most daring.

And as I look up after penning these last words, I realize they’ve vanished.  Embarrassed, do you think by this watcher, or having done their calisthenics, have they retreated to search out errant hay seeds high up in the sift filtered light of the mow or have they flown to the nearby towering corn fields?