Beginning Again with Green Parakeets

Troops of tropical parrots live in the Vondelpark. Parakeets, actually. They’re green. I have heard it said that they are out of place here, but I am in doubt; Amsterdam isn’t exactly tropical, and yet they have survived and multiplied.

The few versions I have heard about how they came to live in the park all involve escape. Basically, an original Adam- and Eve-like couple broke free from either the zoo or a private home, flew to the park, and nested in the abundance of trees there. You might marvel at their ability to survive the winters in this chilly northern climate, and to proliferate into flocks that for generations now, only know Amsterdam as their home.

I live across the street from the park and so I occasionally see these birds sitting on the branches outside my windows. They tweet and twitter and sometimes wake me up. On this very wintery morning, I am watching them from my kitchen window as I draft and design my return to this blog.

What feels like a long time ago now, I wrote this blog regularly. I was off work for a year, I was traveling in my Jamboree around North America; when I wasn’t driving somewhere I was camping out in my friend’s basement and spending my afternoons leisurely trying out new recipes for whoever would come to eat with me.

Now that “real” life has returned, imposing daily routines and morning wake up times that ought to be illegal, I find myself leaning on that old excuse “Oh, gosh I’m just so busy!” for not writing my blog anymore. That, and I have been preoccupied with finding a new “theme” for the blog. Surely if I write and post regularly, it should all be about something. Right?

I have actually been writing regularly, though. I’ve enrolled in writing classes and attended workshops. Someone smarter than I suggested that I stop fretting about a theme and simply post whatever I happen to be writing, most of which are beginnings. Someone out there might read one or two of these bits; someone out there might comment; and someone out there might even give me interesting feedback.

So, stories, some much more fictional than others, from inside my head, from Amsterdam, from when and where I travel. Please resist a tendency to read everything I post as true. I invited Embellishment and Imagination to this party, too.

At the moment Amsterdam is blanketed in thick snow, as if it has temporarily swapped identities with a more typically wintery city. Trams are slow, bike paths are tricky, and roads are slushy. But despite the inconvenience, it’s beautiful. While I walked through the park to take pictures of the winter wonderland, there were the kids building snowmen, the adults throwing snowballs at each other, and those green parakeets fluttering and singing about it all from above.

Tough little guys, really. If I were one of them, I’d like to think that I’d orchestrate a new escape for the generation. Organize the birds into a goose formation, imitating the flight south for the winter. But maybe parakeets are actually meant to live in the cold. Who knows? Adaptation is a marvelous thing.