I step out into the brisk pre-dawn, fill my lungs with the 55-degree mountain air, which is all of a sudden buzzing and rippling in emerald and amethyst waves out of the corner of my left eye. Not quite awake, because the coffee pot has just started inside, I turn in a bit of a sleepwalker's daze and find myself staring right into the pupil of a hummingbird's eye, mesmerized by its hard light burning like a hot white star in the still darkness of the day that's yet to come creeping over the horizon. I can almost feel the incessant beating of the hummer's wings as he hangs in mid-air next to me, like the breath of the morning itself on my cheek, like a thousand tiny kisses.

When I was a kid, I thought hummingbirds didn't have any legs at all--because I'd never actually seen one land anywhere--and the tiny fellows were doomed to forever flap their incandescent wings or else.

I'm relieved that I know better now.

And then there's a ruckus down at the hen house, and the hummer buzzes off. The squawking and cackling of the Rhode Island Reds fills the air, so loud that I think I might have gotten a rooster in the run I bought down at The Feed Bin this summer after all.