From the mud nest hanging at the edge of the eaves, the chicks poke out their heads and open their mouths. Yellow beaks gape wide toward the sky. Standing beneath them, I found myself looking up for a long time. At some point I had stopped waiting for anything, and grown used to simply rising when morning came and lying down when the sun set. But seeing those small lives throw their whole bodies open, calling for something, I wonder if I was once like that too. Closing a mouth that had forgotten what it called for, I went back inside the house.
But since when have those chicks known how to close those gaping beaks? Yesterday evening I was thinking that while watching the laundry hung outside the window flap in the wind.
By the time the chicks close their beaks, they'll be learning to swallow the bugs their mother brings. Even so, all evening I watched the rippling laundry and practiced swallowing something on my own.
Coming into the house, the entryway light is still on. The light that leaked through the gap in the door had reached my feet.
Might that light have stayed on even into morning? An entryway light left burning seems to be waiting for someone to come in, so I gazed at it a long while.