Raptor Rapture

I'm that woman...the fat,frumpy one walking her dogs and carrying a bag on her arm to pick up the poop, not because I'm a good neighbor--I was once told you could be arrested if you didn't pick up your dog's poop in Savannah, but if you walked down Grand Boulevard in my town picking up your doggy poop, you would very shortly land in Whitfield, which for those of you that don't know, is the state insane asylum, is that okay to say....insane asylum?-- But the neighbors know me after all these years, and I can pick up my dog's poop without fear of the consequences, and I do it now because the Sugar dog EATS THE POOP, and really that's grosser than picking it up and tossing it in the trash. As long as I'm cleaning up poop, I also pick up trash, kind of making amends for all those years I skirted being locked away by not picking up the doggy poop (though generally I only let my dogs poop in obscure places or in the yards of people I knew had dogs and walked them without bags on arms, it was a mutual poop exchange) and because it's my neighborhood, and I like it better without trash than with, so I am that fat, old lady who picks up other people's trash, and because of all those years of my dogs depositing doggy poop, I don't even get cranky at the louts who throw out fast food trash and rubber shoe insoles? though the rubber shoe insoles did lie there and hang there (one in the leaf-thick ditch and the other dangling from a stunted crepe myrtle) for several days. Only today they had been joined by a scrap of newspaper several years old and some crumpled piece of gunky paper, and I decided today's the day. So when Sugar pooped, I scooped it up and turned to pick up the trash, only Sugar planned on going in the other direction, and I jerked and she pulled and she SLIPPED OUT OF HER COLLAR, and once when I dropped her leash she jumped on some walker's dog, and he had to hang her, like Muriel had to do with the Welsh Corgi Edward in The Accidental Tourist, if you haven't read it or seen it, do both, and when the walker set Sugar down, she looked bemused and then gleeful, because she could then jump his other dog, and she had that same hound-jumping glee on her face today, only I used my most intimidating you-best-not-even-think-of-it voice, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, as I dropped my poop bag and then stepped on it and slid, but I didn't fall down, and apparently was threatening enough that Sugar hunkered down and I caught her, and as I slipped the collar back over her head, I saw IT, and IT had something long and drooping in its beak, and IT landed high in a tree two houses down. I made note of the tree, then quickly walked the dogs, stuck them in the house, grabbed my bincolulars, rushed back out, looked for the nest, couldn't find it, until IT flew back into the tree again, this time with a long weedy strand, and there IT was, at the nest with a mate who was arranging the building material just so, and I now knew where a MISSSISSIPPI KITE couple was nesting, like a gift from the God of Spring. If I had not slid on the bag of shit, I never would have seen them. I would have spent all of my life, not ever knowing about the nest high in the tree. I thought that. I did. Because I am that kind of woman.