Four Glass Walls

Dancing a rainbow. The fish swirl in an excited pattern as I sprinkle food on the surface. They gulp in hungry bites, dancing satisfaction while flirting fins back and forth.

Feeding my aquarium fish is one of the bright spots in my day. It feels good to care for something—some living thing—and see its joy in being cared for. And I try to savor the moment… If my day is busy, the only moment the fish and I have together is their brief breakfast. If the day is empty, I can savor longer moments of gazing at them through glass. They forage for plant debris, pluck at the rocks with suctioned kisses, and let their long tails splay out in a show of color.

The fish can be a distraction when I ought to be writing. And so, my desk faces the opposite direction. I can only hear the quiet dripping gurgle of their filter with my back turned to their gorgeous little display of life happening within glass walls.

My seat faces southeast, alongside large windows where I can watch the sun rise over the barn to glimmer through cottonwood branches. Although, this affords an alternative distraction.

There is a hole in the outer wall of the house beside the windows, and in it dwell a family of noisy blackbirds. I can see the parents exit and return, just now. In the span of a sentence being written, they have left and returned with full beaks. Their dark wings a glossy blue in dappled light, the voices of their children squawking hungry demands for worms.

Beyond this stretch of cultivated lawn where the blackbirds forage, a rabbit nibbles dandelions beside the barn. I wonder what the flowers taste like to her. Sweet and yellow, perhaps? I watch her slow, deliberate hops, scooting from shade into sunlight now that the pale spring sky has been sufficiently examined for rogue hawks. She’s encouraged by the contented cluckings of the chickens—all white-feathered with cherry red combs—free-ranging across the farm like a close-knit group of sorority girls at a familiar party, taking in territory while munching snacks.

Activity mellows beyond the barn, where an orange metal gate keeps back four other creature friends. The calves— two redheads and two black-and-white mottled, as if they’ve been splattered with pools of milk.

Until last week, I had never fed a calf. The farmer handed me a big milk bottle with a wary smile, instructing to keep one end raised. He laughed hard at me when one of the hungry redheaded calves nearly wrenched the bottle from my double-hand hold. Even when hungry, the calves moo less than their adult counterparts, who graze steadily in last summer’s distant corn field.

There is so much color and life outside these four windows from where I watch. I am like an aquarium fish looking out from four glass walls at the larger world. Am I watching them or are they watching me?