I was out for my morning walk, and as I passed by this tree on my way back, I seemed to suddenly become unusually aware of my surroundings. Things seemed to jump out of a hazy background into crystalline focus, and I saw how the sun was blazing away in a sky that was a perfectly clear blue without a single wisp of white, how the air was oddly quiet and still without a breath of wind, and how the heat was beating down on my shoulders and back even though it was only mid-morning. I could smell the heady perfume from the flowering trees bordering the courthouse parking lot that I'd just walked past. It was very like the 'mystical noon' scene from the fantasy movie that's continuously playing in my head -- that as-yet-untitled epic that contains a relevant scene and a shot for everything in my life -- which features a long-range shot of an ordinary, quiet neighborhood street bathed in the unrelenting brilliance of a noonday sun in summer, with a brass censer sitting in the foreground, a thin tendril of bluish smoke curling upward from an incense stick; the very air seems charged with an air of expectant calm... oh, and with slow, low-register Thai music playing in the background.
Anyway, I then realized it was 'hummingbird weather', to borrow from a favorite expression uttered by a character in the only Truman Capote story I've ever read. It was the perfect setting for the neighborhood hummingbirds to make an appearance -- I looked up hopefully at the topmost branches of the tree... and hah! I saw it.
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