Audience for the birds

My poster presentation is over. Visitors admired my posters and shook heads in agreement with the concept of women making their identity through their brain with thoughts and experiences. My audience came because I had spoken up at a previous presentation by professors who debated the need for religion classes in a women's studies curriculum. The poster presentations were in a hall far removed from other meeting rooms on the campus and beyond the free shuttle route so the traffic by the one hundred posters was unusually light. The afternoon was humid and I decided to take another "ten minute" walk up the campus mountain to Hanwoori Hall, my dormitory. I was sweaty as I ever had been in Minnesota on a sultry August day shocking grain in the field - a goofy trip down memory lane if there ever was one! Imagine being nostalgic about sweat.
One charming elderly Korean lady asked me where I was going and insisted it was too far and too steep to walk and advised me to take the bus. Well I wouldn't have refused the bus but I calculated the distance to the bus stop was greater than the uphill distance to the dormitory so I plodded along in my best alpine climbing mode. It worked in Nepal for 50 kilometers, too, so a thousand yards would be piece of cake. A young lady worried also about my climb. I let her help me off with my jacket and plugged on my way.
I was rewarded by the sounds of birds - at first there was a magpie - not my choice of a songbird, but it has feathers and the gift of flight. I hesitated and stood still until it passed, remembering January, 2001, in Canberra, Australia, when one pesky magpie dive bombed me under a tree, coming close to retrieving my eyebrow for its nestlings. The other songbirds I heard were too high in the trees to be identified but definitely birdsong, much to my delight after the lack of such animals the day before.
There were hollyhocks and coreopsis and roses and topiary to admire along the curving roadway. Three gardners were snipping at the growth of pines near the dormitory. They had been at work when I left early this morning so I'm not surprised at the appearance of many such trimmings beside the streets and buildings. Every shrub so lovingly tended deserves an audience too.
Naomi Sherer