Wood-Pigeon Omens

I don't really know what a wood-pigeon looks like, but their song is threaded in so tight to this time of year their presence is ubiquitous. Even more so this year. I hear them in the morning, and when I walk to work, but mostly in the twilight, like now. Their melodious song, melancholic and beguiling as some folk tale, some sorrowful beautiful thing, calling you somewhere you shouldn't go. Wood-pigeons are the sirens of the landlocked, inviting us not to drown, but to drift. In their song is the sound of being  21, or 17, or 12, the sound of remembering being younger. The sound of wood-pigeons makes me superstitious, particularly this year, and that is never a bad thing. I imagine them as omens for coming summers and lost hours, minutes drifting like December blackberries, tapping against the rainy glass of childhood bedroom windows.