The evening wind came up strongly with the setting sun. One of those brief, brisk autumn fronts, wheeling in from the west that lifted our chimney cap straight off its seat.
It bounced and skidded on our roof until it dove down right outside our kitchen door landing with a metallic clang and a thud.
As I went out to retrieve it, across the darkening sky I could see a curious cloud on the horizon. It was slowly rising, fluid, like something crawling on the tree tops. It climbed into the sky in spires and peaks, and would flattened into a mountain or a whole range, and then sinking again, become a wave washing over the landscape.
And then I heard a faint refrain, a single note ringing out, like the rush of a flood across the fields.
Ten thousand starlings were winging through our valley, flying fast and heading straight for us.
They moved like a torrent down the river bed. And they arrived at a breakneck speed, swinging around trees, sweeping in like a living wind. They whisked all around, high above, or whistling past the ground.
And in the rush of wings and song there was a metallic rustling, a scratching of feet on the open chimney. Within the crush and bustle of the flock, two tired yearlings had taken a rest on the bare pipe.
They clutched and clambered this way and that across the rim, just pausing a moment, when the wind came up again. Then came a cacophony of wings, rattling the walls all the way down, and stopping at the flue.
There was another pitiful flutter as the second yearling tumbled down too with the promise of clear sky farther and farther out of reach.
And then the oddest thing. The legion stopped all at once!
They lit in every tree. They disappeared into the limbs like leaves, lining the wires, and the peaks. On the mountainsides, on the brook side, in the birches beside the house. In the pears and poplars, in the hemlocks and pines. Above the stack of firewood, and the axe set in the block the air around the house was electric with ten thousand voices as they gathered and waited and watched;
talking, telling and retelling.
We rushed to open the windows of the house. We opened the front door by the stove.We removed the pieces of the top, one at a time and the bright light of the setting sun shone in the open windows into it.
Then I turned the flue, opening it slowly, until the path was clear beneath. A single soot covered starling rustled down and out and hopped up on an iron edge. He was quickly joined by his brother.
And they paused there just long enough to blink.
And buoyed by the voices of the throng they leapt up, with wings flailing at full speed, up and out through the open door, beneath the eaves and back into the light, into the pressing weight of that flock.
And in a stroke the entire congregation fell silent.
A great hush swept over the din as the two babes rejoined them. Twenty thousand wings swept up every breath of air, as if they all inhaled at once, as every feather, foot and wing took flight.
An eclipse of wings crossed the sun, gone again as quickly as it had come.
Every wing and whistle the rush of a wave and our house rolled with it like a boat in breakers white with joy as there rose a single note.
Into the purpling peaks they became the waking stars, the falling stars
straight and true into the dark, bright as a strike of firelight.
