The Sky

Today my thoughts and eyes are drawn to the sky passing by outside the bus.

A crowd of pigeons rests on an apartment rooftop. The apartment owners, apparently tired of pigeon poop falling on their tenants, have erected chicken wire sloping down from the roof to the next ledge down. This prevents the birds from landing anywhere directly over the front door.

And in an effort to scare the pigeons off the roof entirely, an artificial owl has been placed on the rooftop. I wonder how long it took the area's pigeons to realize it was nothing to fear. The owl is quite covered in pigeon poop by now.

A few blocks later, a seagull lands atop a lamppost in a grocery store parking lot. This startles and annoys the other seagull atop that post, and he flaps his wings and heads west, looking for another perch from which to spot food dropped by humans. My bus keeps up with him for a while but he eventually vanishes from my sight, behind a tall building.

We stop at a red light. Out my window I see a Safeway plastic grocery bag, snagged by one handle on an overhead power line. The wind is puffing the bag up, but still it remains caught on the line and merely spins in futility as the moving air spills out of its free side. I've seen shoes tossed over power lines, but never a bag - this was definitely a fluke. How did it get there, and what sort of protrusion did it snag so as to remain snagged? Will this bag be there for days, weeks, months from now?

There's my stop.