Violins At The End Of The Day

The late afternoon wind plays with the stray hairs from my pony tail, little strands that escaped the tight clutches of a pink rubber band. The wind sends them armed with tickles to dance on my forehead and cheeks, and through the fluttering mask of hair, I squint in the late afternoon light, looking to the young violinists that have begun to play.
The multiple memories of a bustling farmer’s market are captured in the song of two musicians. The day had been hot and crowded. The strawberries of the season had everyone excited, there were new babies in strollers and the park across the street was a playground for adults dancing and doing yoga in pairs. The small street had been jammed with people, familiar faces who wave at me and those I recognize but have no contact with. I watch them walk by, with their carts and bags and children who have larger vocabularies each time I hear them. The day had been full, there were street musicians every couple of feet and little kids eating ice cream. I had been talking, chatting, pushing the people who were somewhat curious of me into interaction. I had used a lot of energy, and if I sat back slightly, just listening to the violin players, I could feel the pull of tiredness.
Now, even though the day was still very warm and light, the blocked off street was nearly deserted, the market had closed only minutes before and the shoppers had scattered into Berkeley. There were just a handful of late shoppers looking for a good deal and vendors sweeping up piles of lost spinach and stray strawberries that had fallen to the asphalt.
The sounds of violins wound their way around me like a cyclone, coating me in a moving song that held softly to the melancholy of a movie approaching its credit roll. Yes, the market day was almost over, the energy of a Saturday was being folded and packed up and put into trucks and rolled away in large vans that smelled of the fields they had journeyed from. This was the song of the end, the finale in golden light and swaying plains and drifters headed for a train car that stood idle on the tracks. This song was everything we did, everything we were, everything that was...everything that IS.
I was folding my tablecloth when a man stopped to look at me, his hands holding plastic bags full of produce.
“I love walking around here at the end, it’s so cool, I get to see what’s under the display. Like, under your display, it’s just a couple saw horses and wooden planks.” He smiled at me.
“Yeah,” I said, “it’s like seeing the man behind the wizard’s mask.”
We smiled at each other and he walked on. The violinists played on, holding the moment for me just a bit longer.

Little Bird

There was no reason in the world for the little bird to light down upon my windowsill. It held in its beak two little twigs , branches from an olive tree I think, or it could have been apricot, honestly I know nothing about trees.
My grandfather had an orchard and I spent summers there, but goodness knows I never did anything but lay around under the trees reading penny novels about cowboys and Indians that I had found down in the musty old cellar under grandpa’s dusty wooden house. I remember eating the fruits from the trees of the orchard.
One season in particular, came a crop of very sweet fruits. Apples, pears, and other delicacies sprang from the trees. The reds and greens were so rich and they may have been an indication of their sweetness.
I don’t know what made them so sweet, maybe it was the extra rain, maybe it was the wind from the north, who knows. I just remember eating the sweet fruit under the trees in the orchard. My lips touching their skins with anticipation for each bite. I often wondered if the birds noticed how sweet the fruits were too. Perhaps they just pecked at the fruits with their tiny beaks and never truly tasted them at all. Perhaps they were able to taste them and perhaps they did notice the extra sweetness this season.
Maybe they were wondering if the farmer put something special in the soil this season to make them so sweet. Maybe it was poison. Yes, perhaps that was it, maybe the farmer didn’t like the birds and was trying to poison them all. Would poison taste sweet though? Maybe it would taste sweet to trick you into thinking it wasn’t poison. If it were poison, then there would be no birds to wonder about the sweetness of the fruits, so that couldn’t be it.
Maybe the sweetness came from the rain. The clouds drifting by some strange cities gathering strange molecules to make sweet rain. Maybe clouds really do taste like cotton candy as I have long suspected. That may be what made the rain sweet.
Or it might be that it was something in the soil. The cows were eating a lot of Twinkies and their shit made the soil sweet, which in turn made the fruit so sweet.
Why those birds sat on my windowsill with those twigs is still a mystery to me though. Were they trying to tell me something?
Maybe I am making too much of all of this and they were just en route to their nests with some nesting material in their little beaks and needed to stop and rest. My windowsill was the perfect spot for them. The dark green paint was flaking off the wood of the sills but it was still a nice place to stop and relax.
Bugs sometimes came and rested on the sill too. Big giant bugs in the summer time. Those yucky green ones that you fear will get stuck in your hair. Japanese beetles I think they are called. June bugs are even bigger and yuckier. I had one of those stuck in my hair once. It was terrible. Every little girl’s nightmare.
Wait…Maybe bats would be worse. A bat stuck in your hair would definitely be worse. I can imagine them flopping around helplessly in my tangled hair, gasping for their tiny lives just as freaked out as I am. Maybe bats have terrible, scary nightmares about getting stuck in a little girls hair. Never being able to fly free ever again. They would rather be flying around using their radar to catch tiny, bug morsels from the air. Being stuck in a little girls messy, long hair definitely would be their worst nightmare.
When I was little, we used to play in the field until dusk. We would see bats fluttering about seemingly aimless. We would take small pieces of gravel and throw them in the air as high as we could and watch the bats dive for them thinking they were tender bugs to snack on. The stone would come crashing down, barely missing one of my siblings and we would laugh and laugh, rolling in the grass teasing each other about the near miss. Those bats DID know what they were doing after all. They could not be fooled by the small stone, they somehow knew it wasn’t an insect. How they knew was beyond me. Aren’t they blind? Later in the week, when my dad would take out the tractor to mow the field, he would be very angry to find all of those pieces of gravel. We hid in ours rooms to avoid the scolding. But later the next week, when the bats came out again, we would do it again!
I never did get a bat stuck in my hair. I think they are too smart to fly in a little girl’s hair, actually. They want bugs and fruit. That’s it! Maybe the bats did something to make the fruit extra sweet that year! They are probably much smarter than we give them credit for. Maybe the bats and those birds on my windowsill were conspiring together. Maybe they were building something monumental. They may have a whole bunch of buildings that we know nothing about where they harvest the sweet fruit and sell it on the black market. And maybe that’s the secret the little bird was trying to divulge. If it was, then it went right past me, just like those summer days when I would lay under trees, reading penny novels and eating sweet, sweet fruit. Gone before I even noticed.