Fly. And be free.

On the Spit, Canadas are quwonking their displeasure at my approach, impatient seagulls stand, don't float, on ice at the downwind end of an otherwise open small bay. A couple of killdeer pathetically and fraudulently present broken wings as my feet quadruple in weight as my boots bring the mud underneath with them on each step.

But most gloriously is the unwritable sound of blackbirds -- redwing and red/yellow wings. I don't know what the actual names are and don't care. The redwings, the sounds they make, that blackbird inflection and tone, and the warning ding, as if a fine crystal jar were struck with a silver hammer, it's tip covered in velvet... No matter where I am, how many times I hear these sounds, this is childhood, this is the small marsh behind my childhood home where muskrat and blackbirds and bullfrogs, measured by the size of plates -- saucer to salad to dinner -- made their home. The blackbird calling reminds of fungi so large that as a small boy I could stand on the shelves they made circling tree trunks. My oldest brothers carved their names in those fungi (don't know the fungus names either; don't care either) so that by the time I was old enough the names had stretched in size, growing with the fungus. I remember still the sense of loss when foolishly showing those fungi to "outsiders" and the next day discovering them smashed from the tree trunks.

These are the same blackbird cries of protest heard as when we would try to traverse the marsh, moving from one island of grass and cat tail roots to another. The water black with tadpoles, the air more bug than oxygen in places, crawling annoying linings of our noses and mouths.

The marsh mud, the blackest thing we'd ever see, it's smell warm, alive.