Buzzard

(this is old but I've been slacking on the blog...)

This morning I woke up caught in my mosquito net. I hung it yesterday evening and it fell on top of me while I was sleeping. I woke up with a swollen lymph node and a family of mosquito bites speckled on my right butt cheek. On the kombi from Pitsane to Good Hope I gazed out the window, closed of course, and we passed by a cipher of large birds: vultures with expansive wings and large tear shaped bodies. A whole swarm of them were on the ground and they circled around something dead. I don’t boast intelligence and noting the animals’ unlively state is not too clever of me, but there was something dead in the distance. Gross yet fascinating. Real vultures. They’re huge, I’m not sure how they manage to fly when they’re bellies are full of scavenged meat.  Vultures mean something, but what? Botswana’s got birdlife. Just this morning, I saw a bright blue bird—parakeet blue. Not feathers, but plumes. A blue bird flew through a broken sky and mended it together—and then my mood brightened. If I were an animal, I’d be a chameleon. My mood is always changing. I changed from dark blue to bright sky blue azure, to a different shade of blue, but blue nonetheless. Hopeful. Parakeet plumage blue. Brightly pigmented, bling bling blue and the early morning was bad but the vultures picked and fed on the dead attitude that’s disappeared and flown away in their heavy bulging bellies.