On the wings of a dove
Our temporary housesitter, plus my weekly shareables: Roy Kent, Pop-Tarts, and a normal night at Waffle House
A quick note before we get started: I’m in serious crunch time on my book manuscript, so my posts here might be a little fewer and a little shorter for the next couple of weeks. Then again, depending on how my brain is firing, there might be more! This is the beauty of the Substack. The production schedule is up to you and me.
Anyway, this morning I want to tell you about the dove that has built a nest on our front porch.
The front corners of the porch have a secluded spot where the porch pillar meets the beams that hold up the ceiling. It’s just a little square of concrete, maybe the size of a piece of toast, but it’s flat and sheltered. Ever since we’ve lived here, birds have used the same corner to make a nest in the spring. At first it was one of those birds I think of as Little Brown Birds—a sparrow or wren or something like that. The last few years, it’s been doves. Because we’re close to uptown, some of our neighbors call them pigeons. There’s no real difference. Doves sound better. So this one’s a dove.
Well, it could be two doves. Best I can tell, from a little Googling, the male and female sometimes take turns in the nest. I’ve only seen one bird at a time up there. But I do like the idea of one dove keeping the eggs warm while the other one goes out to dig up earthworms or whatever.
At least once a day we startle the dove by opening the front door. It blasts out of the nest with a clatter of wings and startles the hell out of us, too. But other times it stays put. The other morning, when I went out to take its picture, it held still and watched as I stood maybe six feet away.
Our neighborhood is a draw for birds. We have owls that call to one another in the trees at night, hawks that soar overhead, finches that crowd the feeders, hummingbirds that zip in to get a shot of sugar water. One year Alix and I started to hear scratching outside our bedroom window. We opened the blind and discovered that a couple of those Little Brown Birds had found a gap between the window and the window screen. They had burrowed in there and made a nest that looked like a flattened ice cream cone. We watched over the next few weeks as they added to the nest and watched over the eggs, and one day we got to see a baby bird leap off the window frame, take its first wobbly flight … and splat into the house next door. It hit the ground, staggered a little, and took off again. It was like a nature documentary made just for us.
We live in a world focused on death. The daily paper covers shootings and wars and disasters, and there’s a whole section for obituaries. We don’t dwell much on births. It makes sense in a way, because we have all been born already, but we haven’t died yet, and so our minds are drawn to that certain but uncertain end.
It does our heart good every spring to see the leaves and straw get stitched together, up in the eaves, and to watch the birds get to the business of bringing more lives into the world.
For some reason I’ve never seen the baby doves. But I know one morning soon we’ll wake up and the nest will be empty. And if we look close, we’ll find a couple of little white eggshells on the ground. Birth announcements.
10 things I wanted to share this week:
My weekly for WFAE was about the mill closing in Papertown.
This week’s SouthBound was a replay of my 2020 conversation with Fawn Weaver, who created Uncle Nearest whiskey after learning of the black man who taught the legendary Jack Daniel.
As the NCAA men’s basketball tournament starts, the brilliant Kent Babb looks at Alabama—the most talented and most troubled team in March Madness. (I filled out my brackets last night … I have Alabama, Marquette, Gonzaga and Houston in the Final Four, with Houston beating Alabama in the final.)
The new season of TED LASSO is streaming now—NO SPOILERS, we haven’t started watching yet—and this profile of Brett Goldstein, a/k/a Roy Fucking Kent, made me love Goldstein even more.
DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: There’s a new winner of the Most Popular Dog In America title: the French bulldog.
Things that made me laugh hard this week, part 1: This Twitter thread of presidents as pro wrestlers. (Millard Fillmore is an absolute badass.)
Things that made me laugh hard this week, part 2: This SNL skit on a normal night at Waffle House.
About 10 years ago, I had one of the great music nights of my life at a show by the Alabama band St. Paul and the Broken Bones. They have a new track called “Lonely Love Song” and it’s simple and sweet and beautiful.
See y’all next week, everybody.
I have to say, no shirt with a cast on his arm, that is everything.
perfect music choice today.