Question of the Day

   "There's a bird out there," she said.

"Lot's of birds," he said without looking up. "The world is full of birds. Ants too."

"Ants! What do ants have to do with birds?"

He didn't answer immediately, couldn't, too deep in the paper, the news of the day that trumped (ha, ha) everything. "He's been fined $9000. For contempt, of course. His specialty."

"The bird?" She knew it wasn't the bird, knew what he meant, but she had given up reading the paper, even the comics which weren't really comic.

It was a big bird, crow-like, but not a crow, maybe a raven, standing....or sitting on the apple tree outside the window, waiting for the first buds and blossoms? or leaves at least? It was spring, and she too was waiting for warmth and flowers, apple blossoms and eventually those too small, but still delicious apples from the tree they'd planted when they bought the house 30 years ago--or was it 40? Before everything, before children, dogs, the scrawny cat who wandered in, when it was just the two of them, fresh and unwrinkled.

She smiled at the memory, touched her neck, smiled again at the way random thoughts took over so easily, and wondered, aloud, "Do birds have wrinkles?

He jerked up at that. She knew he loved her questions, her too-early-in-the-morning questions, even though he repeatedly denied it.

"Do birds have wrinkles?" she said again, "Under all those feathers?"

"No, never," he said, his early morning response always authoritative. "Think about it," his daily opening for her question of the day, think about it, then, always, his own question. "Have you ever cooked a chicken, a skin-on chicken?"

"Of course," she said.

"And what do you see? Dots or pricks where the feathers were pulled--blemishes, scars, but no wrinkles."

"You are so smart," she said, as she always did, and went back to watching the full-feathered, wrinkle-free crow. Or raven. Maybe it was a raven.