Eine kleine Stadtmusik

On Saturday we spent the last day of our spring break trip in smalltown West Virginia - or, to be really accurate, in the piney regions between the small towns of West Virginia. East of Augusta, west of Cacapon Bridge: that was us simply driving, and looking at cabins, and coming across (a local confirmed it) a bobcat on a backroad.

The sounds, for most of the morning, were wonderful: dense birdsong; soft breezes; the distant hiss of a pickup's tires on a state highway. We stood above a small river that wound through a meadow, and I can still hear the quiet, insistent pull of the water on its banks.

Then, in the afternoon, east, and east some more, and finally back home, to Baltimore City, after 8 days away. And soon an entire palette of urban noises began to assert themselves. A squadron of sirens, racing towards some distant fire. The hum of traffic, to our east and south. An angered honk, from time to time.

Is home so different, so distant, from the woods? It seemed so, as I stood in the dusk, unloading the car. But then a small grace: two geese, honking, flew overhead, above our small river valley, towards their home somewhere in the north. And for at least a moment it seemed that we, and that Cleo, could belong to two worlds at once: that world in which we have to explain that sirens can tell of help on its way as well as of pain, and that world in which songbirds call to birds, both in romance and in warning.