The crows swim the blue sky like an oil slick finding its way to the delta. They caw in place of song, scattering their lesser feathered friends from atop treetops and telephone wires. Most of the leaves are down and brown and brittle and settled densely in piles where breezes had come to rest. Red and grey squirrels rustle the piles, making noise resembling the frantic shakes of a rain stick, hoping their searches might produce enough stores to outlast the death of winter.

If you listen with your right ear to the cold earth, you'll smell sage, pine, earthworm. You'll feel the pinch against your cheek of orphaned acorn caps and white pine needles that have come to lay far from whence they grew. You'll spy with your left eye open, a London Plane tree crooked and arthritic and grey and bone white, set aglow in the late November sun.

With your left ear you'll hear the friction between rubber and concrete and the whine of break dust, the egoistic chatter between women with no jobs and five show dogs, the incessant questioning of youngsters with handfulls and pantsfulls of dried leaves, the half-barks and whimpers of dogs meeting and smelling each other for the first time, but no crows. For now, the crows are away.