Your early morning dog-walk combined with late winter snow today, and brought you not just into a mundane Midwestern neighborhood, but also into Norway. Norway in your mind.
You’re no world traveler, but years ago circumstances allowed for a trip to this place of fairytales and fjords, far from the beaten paths of Paris, London or Rome.
You were in a Norwegian neighborhood with similar snow and silver sky. You’re mentally back for a visit. Now in two places at once. The place where you and your dog are rooted in reality…and the place where you once felt stupidly amazed at how “They have pine trees just like ours,” and “There’s a cottage with a picket fence, a Norman Rockwell scene, but we’re in freakin’ NORWAY.”
And so, yeah, you’re in the Midwest morning, but also in that other one far away in miles and time. There’s a bird there. Of course. This is a “Daily Sightings” column. It ranges free, but there are usually gonna be birds.
And the bird could be a real one, say a winter Robin on your neighbor’s lawn. But it also could be a memory, the “White Wagtail” you saw perched on that picket fence in front of the Norwegian cottage.
Fun to remember the moment, to see that non-American bird in your mind again. And to surprise yourself again by knowing its name.
You’re there in far-away Norway, on a hilltop street overlooking Oslo, while others in your party visit a nearby museum where they’ll come out marveling at Norse carvings or something.
But you have chosen a neighborhood walk. And you see a White Wagtail. Two things about this are notable. One: you’re there—a place you never thought you’d be on this planet. Two: you know the name of that bird.
How? Why? You’ve never seen one before. Only in “birds-of-the-world” books, probably. Maybe the Hall of Birds in Chicago’s Field Museum? You cannot imagine why you knew the name of that bird. Then, or even now. You just did, and just do. White Wagtail.
On this snowy morning north of Chicago, there it is again, this “memory-bird” joining you and your dog, a souvenir better than anything from a museum in that country of pine trees, Norman Rockwell scenes, friendly folk and birds that somehow—for unfathomable reasons—you know by name.
