Five days in a row

One of the nice parts of my new office area is that I get to see the sun rise every morning.  It does a lot to wake me  up and I get to see where it rises change and the angle of it shift, almost weekly.  I'm very sun/season oriented, and seeing it move in a predicted and familiar pattern does a lot to keep me grounded in the now, especially when I'm working so much out of my head, making it winter or fall or such.

But being awake and in the same spot every morning has benefits, as in watching other animals going about their business, their actions changing with the angle of the sun.  For four days now, there has been a frustrated robin hopping along the gutter line of the garage.  I've watched her hop down to the bend in the downspout, checking it out to see if it might be a good spot to build a nest, and then awkwardly hopping down the old door rail still left on the side of the garage right under the eaves where the sliding door hung before they put in an electronic one, estimating her chances at building there.  It kills me knowing that even if she makes one, one of the neighborhood cats is going to knock it down like last year when she built in a hanging basket, (twice) or baring that, a jay will pluck out the babies one by one if she's not attentive enough.

And yet . . .

If she is hoping, willing to try . . . How can I sit and do nothing?

So yesterday I bent a couple of little metal fences in a shallow cup, wired them together, and wedged them into the rail as a platform.  A few evergreen sticks that I trimmed from last week will give her a base to start from, and we will see.  It will be difficult for a cat to reach, and so there is only the jays and crows to be aware of.  That, I can do nothing about, as at least the dead go to support the living, unlike the cat who let the babies die of exposure on the ground.

Today, I watched the robin check it out, hopping in and out before she flew away–and it made me feel good.  Grounded.  A part of something bigger than just me.  It's too soon to be building nests, but she knows it's there, knows I'm watching through the window.  We'll see.  It would be nice to have something other than the sun's shifting patterns to ground me this summer.