For that time on a Sunday afternoon when your boy looks out that window toward the shelter belt of trees that splits the pasture in two, and he sees a huge hawk of a bird, perched way up there in that tall treetop that’s all naked limbs poking the sky, and he wonders what kind it is.
Grab the binoculars from the shelf, dust off the lenses, slowly turn the eyepieces until the bird is sharp and clear, and have a good, long look. It sits still for the longest stretch, then ruffles and shakes its wings once, as if it’s shaking out its cloak, then settles back down. The boy reports all this while peering through the lens that makes it so much closer.
We watch. He watches, through that window, while standing on the bench, looking, looking. And I watch him. Watch how he’s so enraptured like that by that giant hawk out there.
I thumb the pages of birds of prey, with their aquiline beaks and piercing eyes; he reports on the colors of the head, the tail, the chest. I thumb back and forth. He pulls the binoculars down, and checks the book, then raises them again, looking to see.
We decide it must be either a red-tailed hawk or a Swainson’s hawk, we’re not exactly sure.
But we are sure, as it finally takes wing and soars over the top of our house, that this was an extraordinary moment on a Sunday afternoon.
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