Salmon on Sail, in a World Turned Turtle: Everyday Magic Today

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There are mostly clouds in the sky today, and crows. It was to be a laundry day, but it's full sun we need (for at least eight hours) and so we communicated with our friend, "Great to hear the water is online and running clear. We'll need to wait a bit more for the Sun. Maybe Saturday?"

Pete's the breakfast chef this morning, chopping onions and the last half of the green pepper. Our picnic table garden is healthy and happy after a good rain shower yesterday. The tallest of kale leaves added to a delicious three-egg omelet shared between us.

Back to the crows in the sky.

We're an ice-in-the-cooler for refrigeration family, depending upon store bought block ice to keep our Pandemic Protocol shopping system. Pete is now our shopper, graduated as we are from three months of paying our local young people to do the transition shop experience. Now, Pete wears his mask, carries our DIY hand santizier made with 190 proof vodka and a dose of St. Joan's Wort tincture, and arrives at 8 AM to shop at our local market. The market is small and with practice all our long-time grocer friends are masked and conscious of what it takes to live a virus-live society. It's odd for me to see a world of masks; part of the unfolding myth of masks I've written about.

Back to the crows in the sky.

Summer comes and goes here in the middle of the Salish Sea. When it's here, a near-eighty degree day will melt our refrigeration (block ice) quickly. Our once-a-week shopping usually includes a piece of fish, a packet of local raised beef and sometimes a log of good ground turkey. All these meats need to be kept on ice (literally) till one of us stirs it into a meal. Here's where the crows come in.

The other night I pulled out the packet of salmon, took a good whiff. "Too late. Too bad," the verdict was I'd waited too long. The ice wasn't enough. "Bury it," I said. Recalling the many times we'd bury compost of meat-stuff in the ground to keep it away from critters while it rotted down and fertilized. Pete wasn't having anything to do with burying a salmon.

Instead, I learned he walked the beautiful salmon out to the edge of the campground lawn where crows would (eventually) find it. It took a day or two, but yes. Last night and then again early this morning twenty some Corvidae came to eat the salmon.

"Salmon on sail," Pete chortled as he passed me a plate of omelet and raisin toast.
"S.A.I.L." spelling out his play on words, I laughed and caught his drift. "That would make a good story," I said.
It seemed inconsistent to find a piece of raw salmon on a field of grass. But, maybe these old black birds with long memory and sharp eyes carry the memory of salmon swimming up stream here on this Salish Sea Island. Perhaps their ruckus conversation and clan gatherings raise the lid on my shallow conceptions.

Once upon a time Salmon did swim upstream in the waterways surrounding this campground. Once upon a time, Water is Life meant rain water was not covered by asphalt and dosed heavily with chemicals to "purify" heaven's gift of life. Maybe the timely melting of our block of ice brought the Corvidae -- Wild Crows -- into our life, again, a way to infiltrate our world turned turtle.

"Crows. While crows do nearly as well as ravens solving intelligence tests, McGowan stresses that crows have an uncanny memory for human faces—and can remember if that particular person is a threat. “They seem to have a good sense that every person is different and that they need to approach them differently.” - National Geographic

"Salmon on Sail," The crows wild voices turn the words turtle as they fly above with bits of not-quite-bright orange flesh in their beaks. The Corvidae showed up during covid. Pete listened with his whole self, a makua o'o practicing, pulling the small yet powerful binoculars to his old eyes. From the familiar comfort of the driver's seat in our Subaru, he checked his work; noting the condition of the fish. I figured Crows were looking for the source or sorcery involved.

 "It is an injured, limping world, yes. Its vitality is reduced, yes, as if the full spectrum of the rainbow is being painted out with grey. The extinctions of this era -- extinctions of culture and of species, extinctions of minds and philosophies and languages -- will haunt the future in bleached and muted reproach, yes. And yet, and yet, and yet -- I want to paint the rainbow, as far as I can, prismatically, through language. You cannot ultimately break a rainbow, you can only fail to see its myriad, shattered beauties. And I believe in beauty as I believe in goodness, that people are profoundly good in spite of it all, and that when people know about a situation they can care about it." - an excerpt of an interview with Jay Griffiths shared in 'The Writer's God is Mercury by Terri Windling on her blog Myth & Moor

Everyday magic is everywhere. We, Pete and I, are in the company wild birds and rabbits. Our small wagon home has become part of a time that has become more familiar because? Every one and every thing is shattered in its beauty. The Virus 2020 has affected us. Mask on, mask off. Wax on, wax off. Like Daniel in The Karate Kid, we paint the fence, wash and wax the cars, sand the floor of our used to be life and find we have grown new muscle and it begins with imagining something different will come of it.

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"The Rainbow Connection"