7 am. I could love this hour. Especially if it is not raining. Drawing back the curtains, I gaze out the window, at a world of rooftops and treetops and fields under a sky that is at turns silvery blue, pink, or riven with golden skeins. Sometimes I scan the mountain at the horizon—russet or dark blue depending on the light, or skimmed or semi-obscured by cloud—as if it might tell me the day’s future.

No one is up yet and traffic is rare so far; the silence is stitched with birdsong: winged sonic shivers, outbursts of trills, or sustained airs. From my aerie I can spot constituents of town avian life: robins, starlings, blackbirds, pied wagtails, wood pigeons, and jackdaws. Sometimes a magpie appears, which I diligently salute for luck.

One week a pair of jackdaws alight on a capital-T-shaped metal pole on the neighbor’s roof. Feathers fluffed up against the chill, one grooms the other, for quite some time, until the other shakes itself and flies off. Later that week another pair of jackdaws—the same pair?—perch on the same pole; one tears pieces off a hunk of bread, which the other one deftly catches and eats.

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