Evening comes earlier now,
I thought I'd relate to you a story about my room. I have two windows. One of these faces north, over Princes Street Gardens and New Town towards the Firth of Forth. The other faces west, towards the castle. My first few weeks here, a scarcely-audible buzzing noise would leak from the west window, and I summarily ignored it for quite some time due perhaps, and this is just a guess, to my overwhelming indifference to the subject.
The persistence finally got the best of me so I did some detecting, the end result of which being that I found a fly buzzing around the window. I had opened the north window periodically during the time I'd heard the buzzing, so I didn't feel a desperate urge to usher the little guy onward, and I left him to his business. Actually, I figured he (forgive me for personifying the fly as a he, but I, being a male myself, find it easier to relate to a male fly) would croak at some point. But no, somehow he has endured, and I've grown accustomed to his futile consitutionals. The buzz-thump rhythm while I type. I even named him.
Then, this very morning, as I was saying hello, he hit the window with a thud and fell to the sill. He had landed on his back and twitched momentarily trying to right himself. After that, it was all silence. I didn't know what to do. I stood there. For about thirty seconds. Nothing happened. I solemnly considered how best to pay my respects.
As I stood there in my distress, the little trooper hurled himself, suddenly and viciously, off the window sill, which sits slightly below chest-level and from which any falling object would plummet behind my desk. There was nothing for him there but ignominious and anonymous decay in the slight depression where the carpet meets the wall. That's just not right, I thought.
And apparently, he agreed. After falling about a foot, he twisted and caught the air with his wings and resumed his station on the sill, this time on his feet.
How could anyone be unmoved by such a display of courage, gentlefriends? I went directly to the kitchen, retrieved a mug, scooped him into it, and set it on the ledge outside the window. Outside. With the window cracked, so he could make a choice. I left him this way in private to give him time to consider. When I returned, he was gone. I'm glad he didn't take the mug with him, it's the only one I have.
In quiet reflection,
walter