Crazy how these foxes just roam around like a common house-cat!

Magic......and yet so many haven't experienced it across the pond!

Dear Ether, 

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a fox for the first time roaming the streets in London.  To me, a fox was an animal you saw in a forest or a cartoon.  I never thought I would ever come face to face with one—especially one so bold as to stare me straight in the eye and then go back to rifling through the trash as if we were equals in this concrete jungle.  I was slightly afraid that a fox might want me for dinner, but my mates said that they could care less.  In fact, if I came too close, they would scuttle away.  I learned very quickly that the fox was as common as a cat patrolling the streets around the neighborhood.  

And just as I had been surprised by a fox being as common as a roaming house pet, I was surprised when I learned that certain things DIDN’T exist in ol’ Blighty that I took for granted in California.  English gent and I moved into a flat with a typical Victorian bay window that was bright and sunny (well, when the sun actually shone).  I told my folks that we’d finally moved up in the world (literally—we’d been living in a basement flat before) and they sent a hummingbird feeder to attract the lovely creatures so we would have a delightful view.  When I attached it to the outside of the window and proudly showed gent my handy work, he laughed.  He told me that hummingbirds didn’t exist in England!  I couldn’t believe it.  It was so foreign to me because I had grown up in a place where the sound of their buzzing wings and their iridescent bodies were so common. I was shocked to hear that many of my English peers had never seen one before.   I kept the damned feeder up for nostalgia’s sake, but it made me really think about how big the world is and how many things out there that I will never see that are magnificent.  

When English gent came to Los Angeles, we sat outside on the patio where we have a beautiful Cape Honeysuckle tree.  Its orange blossoms, though not fragrant, are vibrant and plentiful and are shaped like trumpets.  In the middle of lazy chatter, I heard the familiar buzzing of wings only a hummingbird makes.  I told English gent to quickly look over at the honeysuckle.  There, like a baby helicopter, it hovered.  He couldn’t believe its little body and long beak darting from bloom to bloom.  It’s chest reflected jewel tones of ruby and emerald in the sun.  He thought it magnificent.  

I love to travel and to discover.  And I hope that I will get a chance to jump back startled and then bemused by a fox like I did in London or have the same wide-eyed wonderment that English gent did when he spied the hummingbird. 

How vast a world we live in, eh? 

Dedicatedly yours, 

—One of 365