Autumn Journal: Robin

The week unfolds beneath a ceiling of gray. Rain falls—not summer’s violent downpours, but a patient drizzle seeping into autumn’s cracked earth.

The parched ground drinks deeply. Day after day, this gentle persistence draws a veil across the valley, pearl-gray and cool as shadow.

Forest light shapes my days. Wide windows blur the boundary between indoors and out. On bright days, honeyed sunlight spills across the kitchen table, pools on sofa cushions, and warms the desk where I write and the bed where I rest.

This week, those same windows frame a different world. Wet light filters through like cold tea. Each black bough drips its burden. Each leaf bows beneath the weight of water. The walls seem to draw closer.

When the rain finally gentles to mist, I venture outside. My wheelchair hums down the ramp, tires leaving dark prints on the wet slate. I inhale deeply, tasting the scent of earth and sweetly mouldering leaves.

In the front yard, robins work the softened ground. Ten birds, maybe more, flash rust-red breasts against the slick grass as they hop and pause, heads tilted, listening for movement below. A quick thrust downward. A tug. Up comes a glistening worm.

These are not summer’s birds, the ones who nested in the oak and splashed in the stream to escape the heat. This is a traveling flock, nudged south by the advance of cold. Their migration holds no epic flights to tropical shores and no sky-carved V’s—just a quiet drift, following the frost line the way shorebirds trace the tide. They move south until the earth stays soft enough to yield its treasures, and north again when spring unlocks frozen ground.

One bird cocks its head. Down goes the beak. Up comes breakfast, pink and desperate. The robin throws back its head and swallows. Three hops. Another pause.

An individual bird may live only two or three years, yet the robin endures. It is an unbroken chorus of wings and liquid song, echoing through this valley for eleven thousand autumns, since the last ice age retreated. Generation flows into generation like rain into rain. Each bird is both fleeting and eternal, a fresh note in an ancient melody that neither begins nor ends.

The rain returns, soft as a cat’s breath.

I watch a robin fly from the lawn to shake droplets from its wings in the pine boughs. Another takes its place on the ground, continuing the patient search.