4:10 PM

New gray cinders, ballast banked along the railroad tracks beside K-18. Bundles of creosote-soaked railroad ties on the other side of the tracks, bound four across. Tracks hide the depth. When did this appear? Something else I haven't noticed lately.

4:15 PM

A single starling waddling across a lawn presents as one of nature's humbler creatures. Laughing in their gutteral squawks at the crude jokes they tell each other about the robins and sparrows they've harassed that day, a flock of starlings loitering fat on an overhead powerline catch my eye because of their numbers, but I dismiss them again as ordinary, as drab little birds, not worth a second glance. But a flight of them -- a hundred, a thousand, more -- each bird necessary in its place as the swarm climbs in a helix against the day's last light, deserves wonder.

Do humans do anything so fun and lovely in such large numbers just because we can? Might be an unlovely fascism in us, I think.

Reading Elwood Reid, What Salmon Know: Stories.

Seated outside the practice room during Taylor's violin lesson, I hear the timing, grace, and touch that he'll need to become good. Still developing, but present.