August 7 - Free Color

Interesting - turns out today ended up being a continuation of yesterday’s post. I might keep coming back to this as a multi-part story. For part 1, start here: https://www.sammykatta.com/writing/2026/8/7/august-6-trees .

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That first time I saw The Bird, it was dressed as a crow, head to toe in solid black with just the slightest touch of violet iridescence in its wings. It hopped up along the branch closest to my window, the movement catching the corner of my vision as I typed. Deep in the flow of this paragraph as I was, I turned my head, registered The Bird with some sub-threshold part of my brain while my eyes gazed right through it, and continued channeling words from my brain to my fingers.

The Bird tilted its own head, scrutinizing me with its left eye, glancing up and down, and over to my screen as if curious what form my current prevarication on behalf of the government was taking. We continued like that for a moment longer, and then The Bird opened its beak and let out a series of three guttural caws, black ruff juddering with the effort. Somewhere in my brain, the image from my eyes finally dragged itself up above the surface, and I finally looked -- actually looked -- at The Bird, my fingers falling still a moment later.

Despite the clear impression of sound, I had heard...absolutely nothing. Perhaps it was the pane of glass, but our windows had never been that soundproof. The calls of crows perched across the street were often audible through the closed window, and at this distance, even the whistles and chipping of sparrows and cardinals going about their day regularly vibrated their way through the glass. Briefly, I felt a sense of curiosity, but very quickly, the imminent deadline of my assignment reasserted itself. Ignoring the evidence of my eyes, I put the anomaly down to the fact that the window was closed, and turned back to the screen.

Picking back up at the start of the paragraph to remind myself where I was going, I re-read my last few sentences, until I hit the end:

"...terminated to align with Administration priorities. However, new programs How interesting You are shiny Yet your eyes have no shine"

What? Confused by what on earth had caused me to type this, I fell back on my default staring spot, the tree outside my window. Fluttering greens played shade along the branches, full of leaves, but otherwise empty of avians -- The Bird or otherwise.

August 6 - Trees

It is a surprisingly marvellous thing to have lived in one place long enough to notice how a tree has grown. I don't mean that I've never seen a tree be bigger than it once was, but as with humans, the radical changes you see in a tree's early years are much more noticeable than those you see in maturity.

In my mother's garden, there were plenty of these young trees - those brought and transplanted by my mother as saplings, tenderly cared for, watered, fertilized. I watched them slowly put out leaves and begin to bloom as they overcame the trauma of being uprooted and displaced into a new environment and began to interact with the nitrogen-fixing residents of their new home soil. As fruit trees, however, they were lovingly pruned each year to help them grow more fruit. Some were dwarf varietals and some were more actively shaped to remain short, in either case aiming to both avoid the power lines above and keep the fruit within reach for my mother below.

In contrast, when I moved into my urban-ish apartment on the edge of suburbia, the tips of the most eager branches greeted me from the bottom of my third floor window. This was a tree that was already twenty-some feet in height, branching out just as far in diameter. Peering past the top of the tree, I could see its fellows alternately lining the rest of the street, trees of similar size clearly planted many years ago around the same time. Even back then, this was already a mature tree, its welcome shade in the DC summer the result of someone else's foresight.

Each day when I worked from home, it provided a welcome place for my eyes to focus whenever I turned away from my screen to think. It occasionally provided drama and intrigue, as a sometimes hangout for a passel of sparrows and the occasional crow. In spring we'd often see the sparrows flying up from the tree to the corner above our window, beaks laden with twigs, and know it was time to keep a careful ear out for the peeping of stray chicks in the walls near our dryer.

This spring, I began to notice some sparrows flying higher up than before, not to our window but perhaps the one above. And with a jolt, I realized that indeed, the top of the tree was now to the fourth floor what it had been to ours, seven years ago. The tree had grown, both up and out, a dozen feet since I had been here. Where once I could see the buildings across the street all year round, now I could only see them in winter when the branches were bare. It was a few days after I first stared into the tree with this realization, appreciating the extent to which the tree had grown and become an ever greater haven for the sparrows, that I first met The Bird.