Nevermore

In my room my computer desk is flush against a wall where a window looks out over an old rusted wire fence between us and our fine neighbors. Yesterday as I was typing I suddenly felt the hairs on the back of my neck rising and had that eerie feeling that something ominous was watching me.  So I glanced up over the computer screen and out the window.

There on the top wire of the fence were three ravens sitting in a row staring at me with their black beady eyes glistening malevolently as if wondering if I might be something they could eat. At once I thought of poor Edgar Allen Poe and his grief at the loss of his beloved Annabelle Lee.

There are few things in this world as sorrowful looking as ravens for these three looked like black robed Druid priests at Stonehenge invoking the spirits of the underworld.

I sat there mesmerized wondering if they were not the ghosts of my three dead brothers coming back for me, or perhaps; a signal that the dark one wanted me to come back down to him into the gloom and the dank from which I had sprung. I wondered too, just how long these awesome looking creatures were going to sit there before they determined that I might be too large for either of them to swallow.

Finally a tiny wren with a pointed tuft of hair on his head came and pecked at the feet of one of the ravens and they one by one flew off with the tiny wren chasing the last one still pecking away at its feet.

I turned back to my computer screen with a sigh of relief and murmured condolences to poor old Edgar.

Later I rolled out onto our deck and admired the roses that were bursting forth in our front yard in pinks, yellows and deep scarlet and one golden in the sunlight.  The beauty of the mountain shadows quickly swept away the sorrowful images of the three ravens and I knew everything was just fine again.

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