Although it’s just past 9:30 in the morning, droplets of sweat already bead my forehead and, despite layers of sunscreen, the skin on my arms prickles with heat. I lean back in my lounge chair and wriggle my toes deeper into the cool, white sand. Children splash and giggle at the edge of the Caribbean blue water and I open the novel I have been unsuccessfully trying to read for the past half hour.
The words on page 12 shrink out of sight as something just above the horizon of the book catches my attention. It is a feather. A strange, out of place feather. The kind of fluffy, white feather one might see on a dignified lady’s hat at high tea. I wonder if I’m hallucinating. Maybe this is heatstroke?
Before I can fully process the appearance of this billowing item, three yellow finches flit into my view. One of the tiny birds zooms upward and snatches the feather in his beak. “What a soft addition to his nest,” I think – just in time to see him drop the feather. As it jellyfishes slowly toward the earth, a second finch dives down from above and, in a flash of yellow and black, plucks the feather from the air. And so it goes for the next several minutes. Three chittering finches, taking turns with their prize like well-trained schoolchildren on the playground.
They continue slowly down the beach, out of my view. Shaking my head and smiling with wonder, I turn somewhat reluctantly back to the neat rows of black and white print in my book.
Postcards from Mosquitoville 