Tag: birds

Some of My Other Hobbies

What is there besides cats, coffee, and writing?

That’s a good question, because I write about these all the time. But there are other things that interest me, sometimes to the point of fascination.

Plants

I have a fascination with plants, especially edible ones. And poisonous ones. I can now determine between Queen Anne’s Lace (not deadly) and poison hemlock (deadly). Not that I’ll be eating either, but Queen Anne’s Lace is, in effect, a wild carrot. I don’t try to identify mushrooms, because they all look the same to me.

I like to know plant names, because to just dismiss weeds as “weeds” eliminates a world of useful plants. Everything from lamb’s quarters (as good as spinach) to jewelweed (soothes the sting of nettles). For that matter, nettles (once cooked, a nutritious soup green.

This knowledge of plants helps me write. For example, I almost killed off a character with ricin from the castor bean plant. Writers often joke about their search histories; I am no exception.

Bread baking

I guess this goes along with plants, because yeast is a plant. I was never more aware of this as when I created my own starter by capture. This method depends on wild yeasts in one’s environment and making a hospitable medium to make them flourish. I kept these going for three months last year during the lockdown, until I realized we would never make enough bread. There is no true sourdough bread recipe for the bread machine. I have my cultures dried and frozen, however, to be started back up soon.

Cooking

I don’t cook often these days, but I am an accomplished cook with some training in food science, menu planning, and nutrition. I also cooked for two years in a Thai cafeteria, and we cooked more traditional recipes for ourselves, so I learned the basics of Thai food and now can navigate around a Thai recipe with ease. I make a mean Kung Pao chicken and Thousand-Year (master) sauce. I’m teaching my half-Chinese husband how to make Asian food.

Reading

Of course, reading. My favorites are fantasy and science fiction, but occasionally I’ll read Regency romance and the JD Robb series in crime romance. I should read more, but writing and my day job keep me busy.

Bird-watching

I haven’t gotten out to a good natural setting for a while, so I haven’t seen any new birds lately. I think it was two years ago I saw one of the birds unexpectedly on my life list: A painted bunting in southeast Kansas. I’m too lackadaisical to be a great birder; I’m just excited when I see a bird I haven’t seen before.

For you

What are your favorite hobbies? Tell me about them!

"I wrote a love song to a sparrow"

I didn’t tell the story I thought I’d tell.

No stories about hardship, no stories about resilience. Somehow, the Dear World storytelling process got to my inner core in less than twenty minutes.

I told a story about love, creativity, and sparrows.

When I was a child, I talked to sparrows. And trees. And squirrels. Mr. Shady Tree lived down the street from me. He had been trimmed to look like a child’s lollipop tree. Now and again I would stop by to visit him. I would offer him invisible TV Dinners and banana splits. He never spoke to me but I felt a sense of comfort talking to him. I talked to the birds in his branches, too. I remember the sparrows best — they were flighty sorts, hopping in small groups from branch to branch, then scattering when cars drove by.

I quickly gathered a reputation from my classmates for being “weird”, and this led to a lot of harassment on their part and a lot of shame on mine. I cared less and less about their “normal”. I isolated myself rather than face the shame.

When I hit adolescence, I discovered more beauty in my world — boys. I felt as if I could study every inch of their faces — their skin, translucent or spotty, their eyes, the truth behind their cryptic scribbles in their notebooks. I could never draw them, never even remember their faces. So I wrote poems. In junior high, I showed the poems to my best friend, and she raised the window sash and announced my crush to everyone outside during lunch. I would spend the time between classes being admonished by the other girls that So-and-So wouldn’t possibly like me back.

The two lived together in shame in my mind — birds and crushes.

One day in college, I wrote a love song about a sparrow. I confess, it wasn’t really about a sparrow — it was about a young man on a bus. He had long, honey-brown hair and round glasses and a faint dusting of freckles and a strong, curved nose. His build was delicate, bird-boned. The rain had drenched him as it had me, but he looked at home in a misty forest, and out-of-place on that grimy bus.

So I wrote the song. Looking back, I had a revelation about this song —  no, two: I had found a way to both talk about my strange reality where birds and trees could understand human speech and maybe even take one on a journey, and I had found a way to talk about crushes without revealing them. I also found acceptance for myself as the child who others found “weird”.

Oh, the song? Here it is:

CHORUS:
Pretty, pretty –
I would not take your feathers,
I would not steal your flight,
I only want to watch you
Spin stars into the night
I’d love to hear your stories,
I wonder where you’ve been,
I wonder where you’re going to
Pretty, pretty.
Who am I to seek you out –
A child who talks to birds.
I’d love to tell you something,
But I stumble on the words.
The poetry of birdsong,
The music of your voice
I wonder where you’re going to
CHORUS
And where am I to look for you?
I’ve squinted at the trees
To watch the flutter of your wings
Float past me on the breeze
The poetry of birdsong,
The music of your voice
I wonder where you’re going to
CHORUS
And who am I to seek you out –
A child who talks to birds.
I’d love to tell you something,

But I stumble on the words.