Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I saw a red-breasted merganser this morning. He was diving, and swimming low to the surface, right near the shore of our little inlet off the Hudson River, in the area across from the soccer field and along toward Indian Road a little ways. High tide, so no visible mud flats.

Very cool. I eventually went in, partly to rest my knee and partly because I was concerned about disturbing him: he seemed to prefer the area nearest the shore, but swam to slightly deeper water when people walked by quickly.

Based on both the Peterson and Audubon field guides, he was probably a migrant heading north, though Peterson says they breed casually south to Long Island and New Jersey.

It's a gorgeous spring afternoon, so I went out to Inwood Hill Park, to sit in the sun and read, look at birds, and walk a bit.

The walking took me uphill a little bit, a relatively gentle slope that takes you over to the river and (had I gone that far) under the Henry Hudson Bridge. A little way along, I saw a couple of periwinkle flowers in bloom next to the path.

When I stopped to take a closer look, I saw that there were not only unopened buds, but some periwinkle under dead oak leaves. I started removing the leaves. Carefully, because some of the flowers had grown through the leaves.

It's a large patch of periwinkle, and a lot of flowers already open. My guess is that some of the leaves had been there for weeks or months, and some were washed down in Saturday's heavy rain.

I moved a lot of leaves, off the flowerbed and then to the pile on the other side of the path, so they won't get shoved back onto the periwinkles (that side has a low stone wall above a slope; there are some periwinkles a few feet downhill of the wall). A lot more dark green leaves and purple flowers are now visible, and many pale shoots will now get sunlight, turn green, and photosynthesize.

I shouldn't send emails in languages I not only am not fluent in, but can't trust myself to spell correctly.