Birdsong
'Indigo Bunting // Bright Blue'
'American Goldfinch // yellow-black feather, yellow beak'
Birding notes written in beautiful penmanship on medium-sized pages ripped from a ringed notebook and tucked away in the back pages of the Peterson Field Guides' Eastern Birds edition on the bookshelf at the cottage.
The writing belongs to my grandmother, Gloria Soda. My grandfather, Anthony Soda built this cottage in Northern Michigan in 1989.
As I sit on the elevated deck facing the towering trees of the adjacent wooded area, I think about my grandparents in the earliest years of the cottage.
The wonderment they must have felt as they spent their summer months experiencing the wildlife of their newly built getaway.
Peering through binoculars and taking notes of the colourful birds as their songs harmonized with the rattling of birch leaves stirred from the soft wind blowing in gently from Lake Michigan.
