Stray Basketballs

Here's what I would have written about, if I'd posted during the summer, and on through the fall. There were hummingbirds, chickadees, robins and cardinals. Squirrels and chipmunks and stray basketballs.

Last week, on my birthday, a squirrel climbed the stalk of the giant sunflower planted in my next door neighbor's yard. From my second-story bedroom, I saw the squirrel scoot up the stalk, reach into the flower head and then scurry off.

Above the squirrel, before the squirrel, I saw a rainbow. There was mist in the air and it had rained gently all night long.

Downstairs, on the deck, two squirrels came to drink rain water from an upturned plastic lid. This was not a lid from a peanut butter jar, or a sandbox, or laundry detergent.

The lid had once covered a sheet cake. At least six inches deep, it now held brown water and dead oak leaves. In the spring I'd tried to grow avocado plants from seed, and the lid had served as a miniature greenhouse.

Out front, against the milky cobalt of the azure sky, the brown leaves of another oak shivered in the breeze.

These are the things that fill me. These are the things that inform my haiku, and my Ameriku art. And they are not things at all, are they?

What informs you? What fills you up?

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