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So this robin comes up to me...
Published: 3/22/2010 11:40 AM
Last Modified: 3/22/2010 11:40 AM

Saturday morning, as I sat by the front window watching spring come in like a rattlesnake, I noticed a robin come hopping, as robins do, toward our front door.

Progress was difficult, as the bird was bucking the wind that was blowing snow almost parallel to the ground, and that had ruffed the robin's feathers in such a way that it looked as if it were sporting a mohawk 'do.

The robin bounded up the stairs onto our porch, which offered no shelter whatsoever from the wintry blast, then managed to leap onto the window sill.

I know it's just the way they're made, but robins -- to my eyes -- always seems to have this haughtily disapproving expression. It's those bright black eyes, that downward arc in the line of the beak, the defiant way they will approach some humans who they think are encroaching on their territory.

This robin crouched outside our front window, head twisting every which way to take in the sight of me sitting there. Then it looked out at the snowy front lawn that just the day before had been bathed in sunlight and full of whatever robins enjoy that lives below the surface of the grass.

Then it looked back at me -- MOST disapprovingly, as if all this wind and white and cold were my doing -- and hopped off the sill.

That was the last I thought about it until this morning, when I discovered that my car, which was parked underneath the lone tree in our front yard, was artfully and voluminously covered with splotches of ... well. Let's say "bird by-product."

I happened to look up, and there was a robin sitting on a nearby branch. The same robin? I've no idea -- there's a bunch of them in the neighborhood.

"Look," I said aloud, "the last two days weren't my fault."

I don't think the bird believed me.


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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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