(this is what I’m listening to as I type, though we live nowhere near a field)

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At our old house, the cardinals swooped and soared through the back yard, pausing on a tree or fence before flying through the air again like a flaming arrow flung.  Here, at the apartment where we are living in-between, and only a few blocks from where home used to be, there are no cardinals.

There are slugs, though, which is something we never had at the old house – big hearty ones measuring in excess of five or six inches.  They slip silently along the side-walk and I narrowly miss stomping on a big fella in the early morning rush for school. 

No cardinals here, just slugs.  And crickets. 

The whole place is filled with their drone when I step sleepily down the stairs in the early, dark morning.  They pulse relentlessly, these black, singing bugs.  Some days it feels like their song is holding us all aloft and, unlike the Cardinal, that bright messenger winging through my days, the lowly crickets tune is constant and in this I find some small measure of comfort; we are carried along moment by moment by the cricket’s song. 

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Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about cardinals and birds, if you’d like to read more, try This Nest, These Birds or A Prayer for Winter.

This post it linked with Five Minute Friday for the prompt ‘Red.’ Click over to read other posts. And, yes, this did take me a little more than five minutes . . .