Conference Tree

A while back, here, in a post on flocks of birds, I mentioned the tree on which they gather. It’s visible from our back yard. The tree died two or three years ago. It is bare all through the spring and summer. Until the city finally gets around to having it removed, the only life it ever sees is in the fall when swarms of birds turn its branches into a living multitude. They swarm, they settle, they take off again. Why do they do it? Is fall the season when, to echo Chaucer, they “longen … to goon on pilgrimages”? A week or so ago, trying to snap some photos of the last moments of a sunset, I glimpsed a relatively young moon in the sky and took its picture too. In that image, we later noticed, I’d also captured an image of the Conference Tree. With the moon at the center of an imaginary clock face, the Conference Tree is at five o’clock.