This far from New York, this many years later, I’ve learned to distinguish every local birdsong, and not just by species. I mean I know which song comes from which actual bird. I have my faves, of course. Hear that? The brilliant male cardinal with a nest in the left-leaning sweetgum tree out back. The female jay’s cry, in half-light, sounds urban with its nasty metal edge. My Carolina wrens make their sweetness felt—each bird no longer than your finger puts out a costly amplifier’s worth of volume; the mourning dove repeats itself, a certain energized self-pity. And all piled up among the chips of mica-sound from silly English sparrows.

Light was just coming clear among the tree limbs near the silhouetted church. I sat rocking, thinking of my dead. The word “my” so warms that cooler noun, now doesn’t it? I sat here feeling full yet robbed. I sat alone, longing for further news and texture from that missing quarter of my heart’s address. I rocked, and drank my coffee black, a person clear and neutral, if hidden. At forty-seven, I’d been rendered further invisible by thinning hair, by the long lull in my résumé. Who was present? Just me and thirty casual acquaintances, the birds.

Then, from a few blocks off, from our volunteer fire department, a clanking and three shouts. The sirens started. Their noises built, needlessly, terribly, loud in a burg so hushed. Red light, drawing closer, stained many trees. Being pulled from my defenseless reverie, yanked to such modernity, I felt the clamor and light to be violent, half obscene. Sirens in New York, I’d cease hearing. But in this village, everything soft even sounds loud.

Red truck headed right by here, I’d braced. And it was just then I heard the secret transaction.

I heard the birds—still tucked into dim thickets, the birds that send out cries not just for joy, but to state their claim and make lives felt by their own kind—adjust their volume upward. They planned to go on being heard above the fire truck’s din. So, the rheostat in every little feathered throat turned up a bit. I felt I had just overheard some secret of the universe.

Birds’ transparent sounds—till now so permeable and random, competitive—knit at once, shot vertica in stripes, defending this, my acre lawn, their home. Their sounds shielded me, and before official sunrise. I recalled those foreground webs in Angie’s pictures.

How automatic came this impulse to defend—one’s tree, one’s young. However solitary I felt here, I remained an animal among other living animals.

Of course, I knew “my” birds did it just to keep on being heard, by other birds. But, in half-light, alone, it seemed to me their voices raged a bit for me, too. Friends on duty, guarding me now; thirty friends are a lot of friends, especially at dawn.