First Paragraph ~ First Chapter ~ Tuesday Intros

Every Tuesday, I'll be posting the opening paragraph (sometimes maybe a few ) of a book I decided to read based on the opening paragraph (s). Feel free to grab the banner and play along.  This week's selection is from a book that I started over the weekend  -- it's awesome. Have you read it?

The Spectator Bird; Wallace Stegner

"On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but has nor quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks, this place conforms to none of the cliches about California with which they advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years.  No bland sky, no cool morning overcast, no placid afternoons fading into chilly evenings.  This is North Sea weather.  The sky boils with cloud, the sun glares out now and the like the opening eye of a doped patient, and the brief beam of intelligence it shoots forth lights on the hills and turns a distant subdivision into a view of Toledo.

Fat towhees sidle up to one another, pinheaded doves forage in the grass, the field next door is suddenly full of robins who arrive like brown leaves, picnic awhile, and depart all together as if summoned.  From my study I can watch wrens and bush tits in the live oak outside.  The wrens are nesting in a hole for the fifth straight year and are very busy: tilted tails going in, sharp heads with the white eyebrow stripe coming out.  They are surly, aggressive, and I wonder idly, why I, who seem to be as testy as the wrens, much prefer the sociable bush tits.  Maybe because the bush tits are doing what I thought we would be doing out here, just messing around, paying no attention to time or duty, kicking up leaves and playing hide-and-seek up and down the oak trunks and generally enjoying themselves.

It is a meditation of this kind that keeps me, at nearly seventy, so contented and wholesome".