New Birds

I sit and breathe and look out into the treetops.

Birds.

I hear the birds.

Our trees don’t seem to invite songbirds except during migrations.

Our birds chitter and chatter and cheep. No trilling songs from these treetops.

Then there are the blue jays who shriek and scold and fly away.

Or mourning doves whose coooos seem to reverberate out of the tops of their smooth tawny heads.

The chattering and shrieking and cooing all sound the same every summer.

But the birds are new.

Well, many of them are new.

With an average lifespan of four to ten years, all the birds I was listening to twelve years ago have been replaced.

By new birds.

Ten years to live a life!

That seems…insufficient.

Outside my window, the trees may marvel at us.

Eighty years to live a life! Poor suckers.

A hundred years from today everyone you know right now will have been replaced.

By new people.

Will they sound the same as us? I hope to God not.

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