Walked Penelope before breakfast this morning. Beautiful sky, looked like God took his white pastel stick and dragged it a few times across his blue sky canvas. The wind was a little nippy but Mother Nature cranked up the sun and the day turned out perfect.

Ever waked up and immediately smiled knowing the day was going to be good? Or ever waked up with a frown and the miseries, not ready to face the day? Couldn’t sleep last night…last time I asked Alexa the time it was 1:48 AM and I was hearing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird. It’s amazing at that time of night I remembered the Echo Dot’s name. So I got up with the no sleep miseries, but soon as I sat down in the porch swing, the miseries melted away as I watched my song birds on the feeders and looked up at that blue sky. I immediately counted my blessings and thanked God for giving me another beautiful day of life.

Kept trying to get the word symphony out of my pondering but it was stuck too tight. Tried to formulate another word but my thoughts wouldn’t let me. I had to be really be quiet to hear the music this morning. The symphony was very subdued. The birds were singing in the oak tree and the bees were buzzing around the pansies. My red bird wind chime is small and it jingled a tingling quiet tune when the breeze rustled the pipes. I was enjoying the quiet when a teenager drove down the street with thundering bass notes thumping from his car. Disturbed the birds. Sounded like a loud cymbal crash from one of John Philip Sousa’s star and stripes military marches. After the car sped down the street and turned the corner, a chubby little wren sat on the gardenia bush by the banisters and scolded me for several minutes. Made me think of my high school band director scolding us when we didn’t perform well at practices. I thought, maybe that little wren was the symphony conductor and the car had disrupted the music and sent the musicians home. He was mad and blaming me.

Oldest brother stopped by after his grocery store trip and sat in the swing awhile. I think he comes to ponder, too. He’s seeing gold finches and purple finches on his feeders. He and his friend ordered themselves new hummingbird feeders. The kinds with the large round bottoms with lots of feeding ports. He wasn’t out of site before I had put two of those feeders in my Amazon basket. Can’t let him get ahead of me in the bird watching department.

The yard symphony never melded back together so I sat staring at the bird feeders and kept thinking the oak tree trunk looks like a rhinoceros on one side and a woodpecker on the other side. Been thinking this for the two years I’ve lived here. Can you see it in the photos? Maybe it’s me but I’m going to ask the grandchildren next time they visit if they can see the animal profiles in the trunk.

Waiting for my subdued yard symphony to start playing again, I started thinking how a symphony can relate to our lives. I looked up the definition of a symphony—an elaborate musical composition for a full orchestra, typically in four movements, in which one movement is traditionally in sonata form. Like a symphony our lives are divided into certain movements. We are born into the world in the first movement of our lifetime symphony with a loud clang of the crash cymbal. We coast along in our second movement of our life with the woodwind section, going through early childhood with the occasional piccolo or oboe solo. If we’re happy in our childhood we might hear the warm sounds of a saxophone.

As we go through adolescence, the symphony picks up the snare drum and the brass section of the orchestra. Each beating and playing music in time with our life’s marching direction. Adulthood brings the full orchestra with bangs and clangs and crescendoes, adds a xylophone to mark the birth of our children. As we age, the climax and fourth movement of our life symphony is a decrescendo into a quiet French horn sonata as we travel through the clouds to heaven. I bet when the gates of heaven swing open they sound like a million crystal wind chimes singing gloriously.