Scenes From A Porch in Washington   

A winter storm ends, and orioles pop into a dogwood here high on a hill.

Midwinter's worst storm broke up right in my front yard. Five inches of snow lay on the ground and a cup of coffee was in my hand when the sun came up, soon followed by a flock of migrant orioles and an early-rising gray squirrel.

Just outside our front porch windows seven or eight orioles popped into the dogwood tree, one by one. They landed adeptly on barren branches after diving in arcs from the tops of oaks across the street, where I had seen them silhouetted against the early morning sky.

I love Washington. On the porch, I sit on top of the world, or at least my world.

Through a checkerboard of windowpanes I look upward and southward. Our street climbs Mount St. Alban, and over the oaks you see the tower of the National Cathedral, and beyond that nothing but the sky. On this February day it was clear again, and just a shade darker than Carolina Blue. As usual you could see the angular ascent of passenger jets somewhere above the Potomac, far enough away to be slow, silent and mysterious.

That sight was obscured suddenly by a lacy white sheet flying fast between our porch and the winter bones of the dogwood. Spurts of wind were sweeping our roof, and snow was skittering downward.

When the squirrel came upon this scene it scampered out onto a limb of the tree, intrepid and confident as usual, until the wind gave it big trouble and it started grabbing desperately, first on the limb, then with hope that the television cable would be more reliable, only to find it swaying, too, so back to the dogwood, and as soon as possible back to the frozen ground.

Ûarrow escape. But I've seen this squirrel, or one like it, fall from the high wire, and it didn't seem to matter. Maybe there is embarrassment, but you can't tell, as you can when a pompous turkey stumbles or falls.

If you don't know about turkeys, watch sometime. Among the cognoscenti of fowl, there is a dispute about how dumb turkeys are, but not about how vain.

Only in Detroit did we have living things in the backyard as big as turkeys: pheasants stopping over during migration along the Detroit River. From the dining room windows on Iroquois Street we once watched as one of those elegant birds, frightened by a sound, bolted upward into our biggest, dying elm, fell from it with feathers flying, and rose to soar away.

Who knows whether it was embarrassed, but short of human suffering this was about as painful as anything I have seen.

These thoughts over coffee on the porch now were interrupted by a new player on the stage: the setter, white with black spots, from across the street, a familiar neighbor. He comes along regularly and seems to be going out by himself, though usually he is trailed distantly by the man he owns.

He came prancing down the sidewalk, looking innocent of everything and happy. Now the birds were gone and, as he probably presumed, he was It.

This is my report from Washington. Don't look for metaphors about journalists and politicians. This just happens to be a wonderful winter Sunday, in this most blessed of times for all Americans who are not left out in the cold, as seen from the city's highest point, with a crown that is majestically non-temporal, in the greatest city ever known on earth. l