Birding

This morning a Tzotzil woman knocked on the door with 15 bags of soil for delivery. She had been supposed to come yesterday while the gardeners were working. I couldn't understand what she wanted at first but she wore a gorgeous electric-turquoise head-wrap and she had her kindergarten-age daughter with her. We got the affair sorted out and she and her daughter proceeded to hump the 15 bags at speed across the courtyard and down to the garden, where the owners of the house are carrying out a long-term open-ended landscaping project.

For now, the courtyard itself suffices. I take my book and I sit on a low chair-like relic made of animal skin stretched in an S-shape. You sit under the eaves of the Spanish tile roof and look between black wood columns to the blooming flowers and skinny drunken-looking cacti in the middle of the open courtyard. The street we live on happens to be one of the last cobblestone pavements in town and cars avoid it, so there's nothing to hear but the occasional wandering dog or drunk or sometimes by night marauding mariachis. Today it rained in the afternoon while the sun shone, so that you could watch shining against the courtyard's cool shadows the sunlit raindrops falling while rufous-necked sparrows needled the grass and the hummingbirds whirred down from wherever to suckle the blossoms.

They're white-eared hummingbirds, very tiny and dear and sophisticated, like expensive avian gadgetry. We've been fortunate to see so many improbable birds in this country but who can resist the garden hummingbird with its urgent metabolic extravagance? As if set in invisible slots, they slide from point to point and halt abruptly. They take one good slurp at a time and slot over like someone's clocking their waypoints with a stopwatch. Some effect a flat tuneless chirp while feeding. For little whiffs of things they're violently territorial and you can see them charge at each other, buzzing in like dive bombers and whacking the vegetation, and these little dogfights and the tuneless calls and the riverine murmur of treetops blowing were the only sounds in the courtyard while I read. One at a time the raindrops would spot the sun-warmed clay tile, where they disappeared instantly and spotted down again elsewhere.