I was feeling quite at sixes-and-sevens tonight. You know the feeling - nothing's quite right, nothing's flat out wrong. What to do with myself? Toronto is in the middle of a nasty heat wave. The humidex today took the temperature up over 40 celsius. I hate the summer, but I have to put in one every year as the price tag I pay to get back to the winter. Since I couldn't beat the weather, I decided to venture out into it to see if there were any breezes at play. I found heat. It felt like eight in the morning instead of eight in the evening.
    I reached the point after half an hour of striding forth where I felt that striding back was in order. Still much disgruntled, I turned on my heel and found myself looking at a tiny bird, no more than perhaps eight centimetres in length. Resting on a wild flower, it looked at me from under a cap of black perched jauntily on its tiny head, like a beret slouched forward over its orange beak. Clad in feathers the colour of a lemon, he began to lift his black wings as though to fly, and then he stopped. For a second, he seemed to be watching me, waiting to see my next move. I stopped. Stood perfectly still. Stared back.
   For that moment, we stayed there in our frozen pas de deux, and then he took off. He dipped down toward the sidewalk and seemed on a collision course until the last second when he wheeled about and executed one swoop after another, dipping and weaving his way along the short stretch in front of me. Then he flew back to the thistle and lighted on its stalk, clinging there with feet no bigger than a breath of air. One last look at me said, "Cheer up! After all, you have seen me now. What more could you need?" Then he was gone, floating through the stand of thistles in an undulating flight pattern that looked as much like a child at play as it did an adult bird off about its business.
   Lovely little goldfinch. Thank you for your gift of beauty tonight.