This sparrow wants McDonald!

New sunny day in our Pacific Northwest. Everyone enjoys and wonders if it will be the last of 2010! Our area is supposed to be the rainiest. I heard recently that it actually rains more over New York than Seattle. But we are the ones that have the most overcast days of the year. Nobody envies us that record. We changed time last Sunday. So it gets dark around 5 PM. When the sun breaks in the afternoon, all the colors of sunset are visible on and between the clouds, a beautiful and ever changing sight!

This afternoon I went to have my hair cut. My favorite salon is informal, close to home and you can just walk in. I don’t know ahead of time who will hold the scissors but I am always satisfied with the result. Solvay, the young blond woman who took care of me today looked Scandinavian. She explained that she is Norwegian and Swedish on her mother’s side. She added – I was not expecting this – that she was also Native Alaskan on her father’s side and enrolled in the Tlingit tribe. “I miss Alaska, she commented. I love to go there and dance the traditional dances with my cousins. I don’t exactly look Native but they all accept me as I am.” She knows the Puyallup reservation, goes to the clinic over there and never realized that this white building on top of the hill at the cemetery was a church, our church. I invited her to join us for worship on a Sunday.

After I went back into my car on the parking lot of the strip mall, I was surprised to see a sparrow on the rear-view mirror of my car, so close to me – obviously fearless, even looking at me straight in the eyes. I could take my camera from my purse and take this picture without it flying away.
I understood what was going on by looking in the rear view mirror: a McDonald fast food restaurant was right there behind me. I suppose cars stop about where my car was parked and their drivers eat their meals they just got from the drive-in. The crumbs and leftovers buns are given to the birds. This sparrow was hoping to get its share. I had no problem imagining this one telling me “Hey, where is my Big Mac?”