The Travesty That Is Today's America

Imagine that you are a big girl in a society where everyone is struggling just for food and enough water, and you have no prospects to set you apart from anybody else in the struggle. Any skills you learned have no value because no one can pay you to use them and there are no raw materials. You can't afford to think beyond the struggle. Maybe you have a sick parent or brothers and sisters who depend on you. The only thing anybody will pay you for is sex, so you can only capitulate, get a dollar or two that way and make yourself available to other possible clients for their free-ranging ideas of sex. You get pregnant that way, for sure, and maybe you pick up a disease which you will have to live with till you die. There are no clinics and no one to go to for birth control. You or girls much like you commonly deal with ten or eleven pregnancies, if not surviving sons and daughters, before your reproductive system or your body wears out. Then those offspring, almost certainly, face a future of despair comparable to yours, whichever kids live to grow up.

This is the way recent U.S. policy has willed that life should remain for the world's poorest poor women in equatorial or sub-equatorial Africa and Asia. Every Republican president since Reagan has ruled that the vile A-word should be the crux guiding foreign policy as regards family planning assistance. If a clinic in a foreign country offers abortion, makes referrals for it or recommends it in any of their practice then no U.S. funds are allowed to go there. No more evil medical procedure, these officials rule, has been condoned through official channels than the A-word, which means the snuffing of the innocent life of an unborn child by the whim of the heartless mother. It's clear-cut and it's wrong and it speaks loudest of the innate evil in the souls of men and women in their procreative years, but particularly women. So we will not condone it by any sort of U.S. funding. That's the way the official Republican thinking goes, whatever many thinking Republican sympathizers may arrive at in their own judgment.

If we are religious or spiritually-inclined and believe that a soul is given to every mortal body at conception but admit that not all who are conceived are born (for any number of reasons) and that mortal life can under some conditions be little more than wretchedness, WHY ARE WE NOT WILLING FOR PREGNANT WOMEN TO GO FOR HELP IN TERMINATING--OR EVEN PREVENTING--PREGNANCIES THEY DID NOT WANT AND CANNOT HOPE TO RESULT IN A CHILD ABLE TO SURVIVE, FLOURISH AND BE WELCOMED INTO A PREDATORY, DESTITUTE SOCIETY?

If souls are eternal, better that they populate somebody in some time or place who can expect the community to value the person, where there is hope of some earthly reward. Let pregnant mothers be free to assess that and let's get on with OUR OWN BUSINESS, let's not mind theirs as if we knew anything about what they have to cope with. In this world approaching a population of eight billion people, why do we make policy that says more, endlessly more children are God's will? Do we believe that God's will is a squalor of wasted lives, wars, unmet need and destruction of water, air, soils and other living creatures we've been sharing the earth with because we should observe no limits on ourselves? We have our own sacred cows in the U.S. value system, apparently, and these are human embryos and fetuses.

Under the Trump administration, the Global Gag Rule, revoked by President Obama, came back in fuller force than ever under previous Republican eras, taking away funding for any form of health assistance including treatment for malaria, HIV, malnutrition and any and all family planning if the recipient organization wouldn't sign a statement that they never provide abortions or refer women elsewhere for them. So, how draconian, mean and ruinous to the whole human and earthly community have we wished to become in this disunited nation?

We are intelligent enough to know that any organism including the human that grows without limits hits limits, on its air supply, its water and its bodily territory. Only a cancer tries to grow forever and so it destroys the body it afflicts. How is American Christianity, the originating belief system in support of the U.S. Global Gag Rule, upholding God and the Lord Jesus Christ by imposing early death and misery on thinking, spiritual human beings in countries that have the least remaining resources to cultivate? 

It's not our role to judge that people--women especially--in other lands, of other religious backgrounds, are less holy than we are. Moreover why do the most sanctimonious U.S. Christians feel that God approves the using-up of what may be the most beautiful, diverse planet in the universe by ourselves collectively and our industry? Do we really choose depletion, extinctions and squalor in favor of money in wealthy people's bank accounts and the stock market? Yes?

The situation in which we find ourselves, and the U.S. system of values as it appears, makes me absolutely disgusted to be an American citizen. I would sooner, if I could, retreat into history and have some other identity from before there was a United States. I would rather that the United States had never existed, with some, truly democratically-governed nation in its place.

Ancestral Strawberries, Lying Low in Bits of Field

Since Trump said the U.S. was no longer a party to the Paris Treaty on climate, the Sierra Club, among other environmental organizations have advised Americans on ways they can commit to remain in the treaty individually or as a community organization. Cities, universities and other U.S. entities have made their own pledges to remain signed on. Copied below is a Sierra Club-issued example.

           Pasque Flower, a spring American native plant evolved in the chilly climate regime of northern prairies

The American People Support the Paris Agreement

We, the undersigned people of the United States, will continue to support climate action to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

I commit to:

1. Reduce my own carbon emissions and do what I can through everyday actions such as taking public transportation or carpooling, making my home more energy efficient, switching my home electricity to renewable sources, and limiting food waste.
2. Support U.S. states, cities, businesses, investors, universities, and other entities taking strong climate action and showing the world that the United States is still working to fulfill the Paris Agreement - and call on others to join them.
3. Urge President Trump to keep the United States in the Paris Agreement and protect federal safeguards for our health and environment from regulatory rollbacks and budget cuts.
4. Call on Congress to hold polluters accountable and oppose any efforts to weaken the environmental protections and climate policies that protect our health and well-being.

So much assorted people activity is to blame for carbon and methane choking the atmosphere that it seems to me that a person not especially talented at hosting parties or political organizing could at best devote herself/himself to cutting emissions on a whole range of lifestyle-enhancing fronts, going on to advertise all the ways and means they figured out how to do it. Think in terms of gasoline ignitions and idling engines, as well as electric current coming from wall outlets. Remember that nearly all synthetic manufacturing is carbon-emitting at some stage of production in our times. Do you buy more brand-new stuff or, as much as possible, viable used/even antique stuff to furnish your home? And then ask, what's my vocation and on whose behalf do I do what I do? What do I value about myself enough to nurture and what else might be my legacy, toward everything that's a part of living Creation, big parts of which are now at risk.

     Now that I have a yard of 12,100 square feet, counting the house and gravel parking spot, and no power mower for the grass I'm remembering the summers fifteen years or more ago in a smaller yard that I'd planted with native prairie flowers all around the skirting of the house. That yard got mowed with a Sears Craftsman reel lawn mower that husband Jerry bought me. That mower's been in storage mostly for the past dozen years, but now I've gotten it back. Lately I had the blades sharpened by a qualified neighbor and this is my intended mower for as long as I am master of my fate. No carbon spews out of it (except for the little puffs I'm exhaling!)

     A reel lawn mower, in contrast with a gasoline or electric mower, cuts the grass selectively, rolling over but not cutting stems that stand above the thickness of turf below. Sparse herbage of whatever kind tends to be spared by the tumbling blades. The cut grass ends up not shaved like a conventional power-mowed lawn but noticeably shortened and textured with longer tussocks lying over against shorter in a beautiful effect reminiscent of hay maturing in a meadow, or prairie grass riffling to the breezes.

    Slow-mowing the way I do it won't work for a lot of people, especially with the bigger yards; it verges on being strenuous exercise along some stretches of ground, especially for the shoulders and upper arms. Of course for other folks that's a point to recommend it. However, combining your mowing practices with food and flower gardening, and/or cultivation of wild native plants is a best-yet approach to phasing carbon spew out of your yard care. City rules where I live say grass is to be kept no higher than 5 inches. The entire front and streetside regions of my yard can be kept like that for the grass growing season by slow-mowing. Around the corner on the north where the lawn blooms this time of year in orange hawkweed and patches of white pussytoes I've begun contouring it with mowed pathways around the thickest orange and white stands of those meadowy flowers. On the highway side are a couple more long patches in which pussytoes and a few blue forget-me-nots (like the hawkweed, not native but naturalized from old Europe) rear their blue and white heads. The yard so far looks groomed, with a contrast between naturally occurring moss where I have wet ground--a low carpet of lawn and high fluttering tufts, and it's colorful like a proper northern Minnesota forest clearing. I don't see how it could be considered unkempt or unsightly no matter who's looking at it.
    
     Manual, non-motorized yard care edges out the need for physical fitness routines, if you have any. Then, which errands can be run on foot or by pedal-power? You might find you really do have time for these self-energizing chores ever since you've been making your living--at least some of the time--from home. This is habit-building that can preserve bodies, the air, the climate, and the wild neighborhood of distant kin that have been succumbing to pavement, traffic, commercial/industrial chemicals and the changed weather regime with its symptomatic harsh flooding rains, angry heat and opposing runs of drought. 

                                          New-cut lawn with standing summer wildflowers left as found


       There are less-kempt lawns than my own in this town, other yards besides mine where ground is allowed to diversify from monotonous grass (monoculture) back into its old mixture, supporting broader-leaved standbys of the natural community that lies beyond; by keeping these growing you will have food plants for everything including maybe yourself. People have a long history of foraging plants from just beyond their doors. This thought opens out a long green-gold rug of memory, as I recall crops picked in open air in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and to a lesser extent later. Wild red raspberries,  black raspberries with seeds lodging in the teeth till poked loose and nibbled to fragments just between two teeth, wine-tart blackberries and dewberries, blueberries in Lake Superior country, mulberries along fence rows, apples in orchards long untended except by bees still free to flourish, a plum tree, a forgotten peach tree that let 32 immaculate peaches the size of softballs onto the lawn's edge, and the wild strawberries of late June. The strawberry blossoms (Fragaria virginiana) were a signature of well-drained ground abundantly warmed by sun at summer's onset. The fruit, big as thumbnails at a maximum, hid hanging just above earth, screened in grasses, with the beaconing aspect of new-found Easter eggs. Nursery-grown strawberries could never taste as sweet. A hilltop's picking of strawberries could add up to the 3-4 cups called for in a pie. 

     Shown below is my newest botanical in watercolor and ink, a miniature piece brought forth out of preserved memory and thanks to obsessive lawn care practices abandoned in the face of the foreclosure crisis and of all the things that have hounded midwestern U.S. citizens away from the towns lying along remnant strips of countryside. At least here, a dainty ancestor to one of the fruit crops most cultivated in this land still keeps to its life cycle.

Conservation, conservatism and, yes, liberalism are roots to the same commonplace plant...

       Wild Strawberry Marked your Path  - appearing soon at https://www.epiphaniesafield.com/

Does Someone Wanna Coax him Out?

It's the beginning of May and we birders still have a lot to look forward to. Yesterday I heard a northern waterthrush in soggy woods by the river within a mile of home.  It's a jolt of momentary melody and another debonair songbird whose entire class of creatures has always gripped my heart; even more than most animals birds are for some human beings the utmost subjects of art. That heard bird, a species of warbler even though it's been named 'waterthrush', foretokened the 2017 arrival of breeding warblers here to the northern forests, or to the North Woods, or to the bush, as known to Canadians.

A seasonally recurring bird in watercolor/pencil, seen in fall along the shores of Lake Superior: Calm and a Pipit



Since birders are people of all different kinds of drive and talent, it seems there are various attractions inherent in birds that may trigger any one person's fascination with them. I've known of birders to come from backgrounds as varied as industrial manufacturing, auto repair, law and politics, the military, music, teaching, graphic arts, the church, medicine, the biosciences and the hospitality industry. Some birders are assertive types who will challenge others and campaign against civic wrongs; others are retiring, comparably meek sorts who prefer the company of nature and animals over the rest of us, but who might after some agonizing turn out to a public meeting in order to confront the prospect of disaster. So, out of the cross-section of types described here, why couldn't an invitation be made to Donald Trump to come witness a spring bird migration? 

Of course he could prove to be exceedingly bored, lacking the powers of eyesight or the curiosity to bother sorting even a single moving bird out of its background. But what if he's never been properly tempted with the opportunity to make birding his own kind of sport? And what do I really know about Donald Trump beyond what I've read, including suggestions that he's got dementia coming on? But if all it would take is a certain kind of appeal to a certain notion of sport within Donald Trump then would someone who knows him, or knows someone who knows him, try taking him on a field trip? If he could see splendor in a $$$ designer cheesecake, or even in a double Big Mac meal, what mightn't he see in a bird that's flirting its magnificent tail, or speeding after prey, especially if he could spot the bird before his companion(s) did. It would give him a personal triumph, which he demands at all costs, from what the articles about him say. Going after new and different birds could stoke his need to pursue a flying quarry worth more to brag about, maybe even in his own sense of aesthetics, than a tiresome golf ball on turf, though he might or might not have to let go of old biases toward the end result of getting laid. Of course too he could walk along, or roll in his cart if he must, at his own pace, and once coming in from the trail he'd find his day changed and even some explosive kinks in his mood loosened up--for no reason he can name. At any rate I'm just saying what if... because, in a desperate ploy to stall his issuance of executive tweets, simple measures like this deserve a little considering even if they come from my own most worthless daydreams.

Wolf in an Enriched Setting

Flat countryside full of watery pockets that freeze and melt back into cool swampland triggered this painting. My home region along the Canadian border remains wolf habitat, and for a person a wolf sighting tends to be remarkable and quickly over, since the wolf wants to get away. I wanted to portray one wolf that paused, sadly if I'm not mistaken, alongside me in a manner that so much carnivorous-animal art does not pick up on. When I reflect on North American paintings of the wolf I think of wolves in glorious poses with heads high, or wolf packs engaged in chases. My Tuesday morning wolf from the spring of 2016 paused in a bulldozer's ruts, ducking her head and exuding suspicion at being viewed by someone out a car window. I had a moment's vision of German shepherd dogs made afraid by a family member's loud scolding, in a cowering pose. This wolf cringed with lowering head and ears for a moment, but then regained her dignity and exited tall and trotting, taking no visible path across a poplar grove. 

This art piece aims to extol our continent's lingering timber wolves in all their well-warranted shyness, which helps them save their own lives concurrently with all our industrial expansion, murderous trigger-joy and ingrained superstition about how cruel wolves are and how hungry to eat us, not to mention our fears for our pets and our livestock. The composition seems overpowered by the flatness of the foreground. Depth occurs in layers, with rain clouds behind a distant line of forest suggesting a layer of hills within, and then the grove of 'doghair aspens' like one continuous, many-stemmed tree erupting from the flat meadow behind the wolf. The wolf is assuredly the star of the painting, exposed like a potential victim in front of a human ogler, armed to shoot or merely passive. This land's marshy flatness, from the perspective of the painting, combined with cold climate and soil infertility recommends itself to onlookers who would rather see places still this rustic kept vacant from takeover by our enterprise. But no matter, this little wolf landscape looked too flat and too inconclusive, to my judgment. The open-ended issue for me is how my wolf as shown would or wouldn't convey fear of whatever had put it ill at ease. An art piece about a fleeing, frightened wolf might better be dominated by grass and landforms, the traditional retreat of wild wolves which cover so much countryside ( up to125 miles in a day, according to Barry Lopez in his Of Wolves and Men) in all their questing, long-legged might--the wolf in that picture nearly lost to sight.

So my first wolf scene as it was lacked context. I still needed to show that the wolf knew how to exit from the hazard that comes with a human encounter. That more accurate context invites use of the poetry of little trees whose whole purpose from their tender beginnings is to reclaim open land, making cover for littler and larger lives both plant and animal. The north country's poplars, or aspens, sparkle in the breezes, quivering, delighting us as we cross their expanses. Is it possible that this wolf in art, whose form never underwent any revision except a little more contouring of its fur coat in the meantime, has gained in dignity because a grove of sapling aspens grew up around its route of escape? A bit of added downslope, as well, takes away from the earlier sense that the wolf is heaving and about to get sick, or is in disgrace.

A Lonesome Retreat vs. a Frenzy of Adaptation

In winter when soils and bog waters are frozen there is a creek I walk just about due north of home, out of hearing range of most anything human except the odd gunshot, or a plane high up. I'm on the ice or on erratic marginal land petering into islets sometimes just big enough to support one of my feet, with little bog plants bearing leathery reddish leaves all between my strides, which are slow and ponderous in case I start to hear any ice cracking. Also I'm listening, since I want to see winter's most secretive warm-blooded fellow-creatures that venture through our spruce bogs. On each side stand the tree citizens of cold wet terrain, old black spruces and tamaracks maybe as tall as a store building on the edge of town. They take a long time to grow in the acid-rich watery soil, which in certain spots is a living upholstery that bobs on top of groundwater if stepped on.

A boreal chickadee, more predictably found near a cluster of suet feeders in prior winters, would be welcome if I could hear any chickadees at all, but this time hardly a one calls out throughout the afternoon, and no wheezy boreal chickadee voice this whole winter long. The boreal is shyer than the every-day black-capped chickadees, much more selective of its habitat which is typically bogs, and--could it be--prefers to stay away from ourselves, the bipeds that talk and lift binoculars at them. Yesterday I noted only the chet-chet of white-winged crossbills calling from one to another sky-high somewhere where there may have been a view of cones on firs or spruces.

It's become significant to me how much oftener, if it happens at all, I see my wild four-legged kin from the road where I'm driving than I do anywhere I happen to be walking. Or if I meet a big mammal from a trail I'm walking or skiing it goes by in a flash, like the cougar silhouetted off to my right in post-sunset forest by a river, or some low brown animal or other deep in grass beside me on a fishing afternoon. Cars quietly coursing a county road or driveway seem to be more trusted since the other creatures know they don't, by nature, swivel around suddenly or leave the road but to keep their bearings, though risk may intensify if a car stops at any point. What wild animals make of ATVs probably fits parameters of its own.

In any case rare creature-sightings come as surprises in places to any degree wild or worked over by human industry, like bird rarities dropping in on suburban lakes or farmers' mud flats. In the Anthropocene Era, the geological time period that mass human activity is said to have launched beginning with the atomic bomb in the mid 20th century, every shy outnumbered animal a person sees can be thought of as having some human influence brought upon what it breathes or circulates through its tissues or what perils it dodges. But if it lives, rejuvenates itself, bears offspring and risks showing itself off to respectful gawkers like ourselves, it's made some adaptation to our ever-growing takeover of earth. For those of us excited by novelty and resilience in the animal kingdom, hope for these creatures endures.

                            Mixed-media pencil-watercolor: Pecking Order in the Collapse of Seasons

Right about now, their struggle seems inexorable, since too many business-immersed people making up corporations consider little as important as the mandate of growth in profits, theirs and their allies; in the age of water drawdown, climate collapse, pandemic and famine there can only be a crescendo and a collapse on the large time scale. Nothing grows forever on a finite earth; the faster the would-be subduing of nature, the sooner and more abundant the repercussions. All kinds of living things, meantime, are moving to where fear or new atmospheric conditions sweep them. We have exotic plants and animals, and we have extinctions where wild beings were stranded in the only homes they knew.

The mixed-media art piece shown above, Pecking Order in the Collapse of Seasons, was drawn from an initial scene in grittiest downtown Duluth, Minnesota where imported, naturalized bird species like the English sparrows and the Eurasian tree sparrow shown on the wall commingle in the breezes, in the wake of confused, abbreviated seasonal phenomena, with stray plants that will grow in the poor soil at the footings of a parking lot, or out of cracks, plants whose seeds were borne from nearby beaches or  farms or gardens way inland. Sorrow yet wonderment at all kinds of transitions out across the natural world amid the chill of this past winter attended this work in a corner of my latest home in Floodwood, MN. Dried clippings of last year's weedy fruit and flowers served as my models. The piece is 12 x 9 inches or 30.2 x 22.7 cm. unmatted, and is painted in watercolor and pencil on cold-press 140 lb. watercolor paper. 

In which the Wind-borne Find themselves Impelled

This winter, for two full days on separate week-ends I've been one of the birders heading over northwest to try and see a rare bird visitor, the curve-billed thrasher who should normally be found in warm arid places mainly in the far southwestern U.S. Work-related priorities during the last three occurrences of rare birds have cost me those sightings; I'd miss them by at least a day while I ran errands or took care of some first thing first. Each time I got there the bird would have left the scene, gone for good or just temporarily, where it gathered less attention. Gales of wind, rain or snow have a lot to do with odd bird arrivals everywhere, I have read. Yet why a thrasher from hot lands of chaparral, sage and cacti would opt to roost in spruces along city streets in Itasca County, Minnesota all beset by frozen peat bogs in January's deep freeze no one has explained so far as I know, but it's interesting to think about animals no matter what kind they are, and what some sports among them may do partly by choice. For corresponding reasons birders feel compelled to zoom along miles of highway, familiar and not, to see a strange and different bird for its unique evolutionary splendor, even though it might be an immature dressed in drab plumage.

If this thrasher continues showing up in the same neighborhood I figure on making time again to try finding it with the help of others who will be trying, most having come a lot more miles than the 36 I've been traveling to get there.

Meanwhile I'm most of the way through the homespun travel memoir From Blueberries to Blue Seas by my friend and neighbor Curt Bush, published just last year by the Savage Press of Superior, Wisconsin. In 2013 Curt followed where his heart and fascinations were calling him, taking a 28-foot sailboat he had bought and outfitted for a long solo journey out of Duluth and down the other Great Lakes, out the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Coast of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, ominous with winds and seasick rollers, crags and sunken rocks and three-day fogs. Having trained himself on earlier, less suitable boats on the perilous near-shore waters of Lake Superior he had gained the skills it took for him to survive storms, mysterious tidewaters, shoals and other deceptions of nature besetting the long route from midcontinent to the sea. The story, in lighthearted tones that reflect the teller's everyday style among friends, nevertheless recounts his stresses and moments of rage interspersed with his delight in places, landmarks and companions met, cherished and left behind. In the part where I am today he is nudging his way along the coast of Nova Scotia in a fog and a headwind, with reefs and boulders to either side, making only 30 miles in a day, using charts, an instrument called a chart plotter and his anxiously squinting eyes in order to keep from wrecking against obstacles and ledges barely to be seen alongside. Once he puts up for the night in a bay on an island wrapped in fog, the only sheltered bit of water the maps reveal, demonstrating how, even in the technological age, a person can still painstakingly venture with something of the attitude of fear, daring and triumph known in the Age of the Explorers over lands they crossed, at a pace truer to that period before mechanized transit. No human may have been on that scrap of land before him, he'd have supposed for at least a moment. This reader would love to have had the know-how to make the same trip herself, or a different trip on a route even farther from popular consciousness.

The thought came to my mind as I was reading, and not for the first time: what if an ancient overland traveler, a North American of 200-300 years ago, could be reincarnated and sent walking over familiar terrain, with at least a vague idea of how much time had elapsed. What would the person see that still evoked the place in those bygone centuries; what rediscoveries, besides the stark changes, would the person proclaim to some modern-day fellow-traveler, like me? Could it be that as long as there is humankind there will still be be a few trekkers on foot or by sail or by hand-powered boat, seeing what is out there up close and intimate, growing spellbound at the hand of nature?

In our time when the urban hordes and the corporations supposed to serve us all threaten to scrape  away soils, acidify waters and ruin the climate for anything out in the open, it seems to me a kind of learned adaptation to detach in happy-go-lucky style and move within the moment, eternalizing it inside the self. Whatever the weather we'll weather the weather (if the means persist) as some old song said. It's easiest if the present weather is a kind you savor--bright if you adore the sun, dim if that fits your temperament..

Remembering back to last fall when week after week of August-balmy sun prevailed and unusual people like me, not particularly a sun lover, fretted that we might have crossed into a new winterless era marked by long dark nights with the interspersion of a little frost, forget the snow, I've been drawing and painting a different, recent bird visitor. Day after day back then we had had southwesterly winds. Those must have been the impetus for the sudden, startling Eurasian tree sparrow seen on a weekday morning from within my car where I slouched in the driver's seat looking over a call list I was planning to use that day. This was in a sloping gravel parking lot above an alley in downtown Duluth where English sparrows whirl and forage, pigeons peck and gulls swoop after morsels flicked from cars. I had seen my first Eurasian tree sparrow in the January not quite two years previous, a visitor to feeders in Hastings in southern Minnesota. But now as I looked at the specimen just an arm's length above my windshield on top of a retaining wall, I was stirred with a memory of rushing from the car in weeks recently past and glimpsing what may have been an earlier Eurasian tree sparrow but dismissing it through inattention. Some days later a local authority on birds saw another Eurasian tree sparrow in the town of Two Harbors just up the Superior shore. I connect these strays with the southwesterly winds that must have swept them from Missouri or neighboring Illinois where their species, by some whim introduced from Germany in the 1870s, is more reliably sighted among the grubbier, more raucous and ubiquitous English sparrows.

Work-in-progress with English sparrows and sole Eurasian tree (or German) sparrow on top of a cracking, very American retaining wall

As the days lengthen and thaws allow me the chance, I will keep at this little 12 x 9" piece of work that shows both species (not true sparrows) side by side but mostly minding their own affairs, with a background that suggests crumbling, dispersion, residues and traceries of what once made up the area environment. The mood suggests the whimsical and fleeting, the weather-borne, restless and unstable, given over to wandering for maximal stimulation if no other gain.