birds of a feather

The birds came back to start roosting in the trees in the courtyard behind the apartment. There are several large trees and by the middle of summer every branch will be heavy with them, I don't think they're supposed to be there but they are. They fly around the city during the day and I'm sure it causes actual problems, but for me personally it's just the noise. When they return in the evening the sky is Hitchcockian, the sound of wings beating, the blockage of light, the sense of something impending. They start calling to each other at the first light of day so in the summer it's a full cacophony by 5 a.m. A few of the neighbors have strung shiny paper across their balconies, I assume to keep the birds out, though it's also quite pretty, the flashes in the light. The weather keeps going back and forth between winter and spring, like it is also not quite ready to put away its jacket even while it is definitely longing for the sun. Everything resonates to me with the cusp of change. Two of the trees in the courtyard are in full bloom, white petals. Others are still bare from winter. The building next door is having the facade repaired and the workers all took a long-cut through the courtyard to get to the back rather than go through the building's own doors, so there's a slippery mud slope now where grass might have grown. They were pretty tidy about it, though, considering. Our facade was freshly redone right before we moved in, which means 23 years ago I think; it now looks pretty worn down, though less than most buildings did when I moved here and fell in love with the crumbling beauty of this town, which looked like a black and white photograph, filled with implied meaning where it lacked color. Someone yesterday said that our moving to this neighborhood was gentrification which while I am very gentrified is not, I think, what that word means. The neighborhood I'd been in before translates as Kingsfield, although no kings were present. The neighborhood I've lived in since was filled with students living four to a room and with lots of old people who had lived here through it all, the Velvet Divorce, revolution, before that Communists, Nazis, one woman in our building even before that. There are marks on the walls in the cellar from when they hid from Allied bombs, when they were occupied. But then one of the old people died, and his widow found the place too big for one person and she sold it and we moved in. When we fixed the broken holes in the floor we found newspaper scraps from when it was built. An article about talkies and whether they might replace regular movies. And now we have lived here for decades, longer than I've lived anywhere. I recognize that it is very funny that I will move to a different place on the same street but I do love the street and the neighbors, the convenience of the tram stops and the trolleybus, and I love the life that goes on in the courtyard. To which, by the way, I now have a key. With which to open doors to places that always belonged to me, so to speak. It's not bad.