January 12, 2021

Some Tuesday mornings I wake just after 3 AM, without cause that I understand. Only Tuesdays, as this morning. Instead of fighting to go back to sleep, I wrote on The Dead Shall Live. Realizing that the plumbing inspector is coming next week instead of today, exhilaration returned me to Lake Powhatan, where I again broke my steps record for 2021. Returned to the lake because I wanted to see if the hooded mergansers were still there. They were, and this time I saw the females. The mergansers were joined by a pair of buffleheads, my first ever sighting of them. They’re smaller than mergansers, and hunt very much closer to each other than the spread-across-the-lake mergansers. Walked around the lake, and saw hermit thrushes in the waterside brush. Flushed a great blue heron from her high perch. She looked scraggly, probably one of this year’s chicks not altogether happy with the cold. In the calm marsh where Bent Creek flows into the lake, mallards floated in unearthly serenity. A kingfisher rocketed out of the deep woods over the lake, and then back into the woods, following the creek. I don’t think he was fishing, but exulting. 

My mortgage company send a letter that my escrow account is deficient by 5 cents, and I can forward that all at once, or spread it out over a year’s payments.