A bird's eye view

[girlyswot]

My flat is on the second (US = third) floor and because of the way the ground slopes, it feels much higher than that when I am looking out of the window. Normally my attention is caught by the water a couple of hundred yards away in the Cromarty Firth. It is tidal and so it's always fun to watch it rise and fall through the day. Or I'll look across the sea to the Black Isle. Or, very often, I'll just be mesmerized by the ever-changing sky. I have my Gmail theme set to 'Tree' which has a weather-sensitive element that just can't keep up!

But today it is foggy. I can just about see the houses across the street down below, but not the fields and certainly not the water. My attention is focused instead on the tree immediately in front of the window. There are several tiny blue tits perched on its bare branches, pecking away industriously, looking for food. I don't think that anyone else (except possibly my neighbour) can see them.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a second-floor room in the front quad at Exeter just opposite the chapel. From my window you could see all the details of the carvings of the apostles that were quite hidden from view at ground-level. I loved sitting in my window seat and looking out at my private gallery.

What are your hidden, private places? What do you see that no one else notices?

Comments

[amamama.livejournal.com]

My computer is on the first/second floor and I have a view that goes past the neighbours house, across the field they said they's start developing seven years ago, but which is just getting filled up with trees as time goes by (it's been a thistle farm, which is so not fun to have as a neighbour, I don't know how many thistles we weed each year), but the view across the fieald to the hills in the distance is quite lovely, and one I savour, because when they finally do build, that view will be gone and all I'll see is houses. Right now, though - in this very moment - we've got the blue hour, and woth the snow that arrived over the weekend, the effect is magical. It really *is* a blue world out there. Beautiful. I'm not sure I have that many hidden, private places, but I do tend to see (and fall in love with) all the wonderful details around me. A rusting bulldozer at the edge of a field, slowly being invaded by nature, the blue hour, the way the snow first attaches itself to one side of the light poles, then when it gets slightly milder, slides down in all kinds of mesmerising serpentine patterns (oh how I loathed not being able to run around with a camere yesterday). I've been told that I see what no one else sees, and I've never quite understood what that is - but maybe this is it? All the wonderful details, all the proof of life, of nature, of creation everywhere? It's a wonderful, magical world we live in.