Every cloud has a silver lining.

There was a pair of cedar waxwings playing in my back yard this morning. It's been a long time since I've seen anything but house sparrows and pigeons, so this was quite a treat for me.

Birds don't last long in my neighborhood. My neo-hippie neighbors, who are so ecologically conscious that they border on obnoxious, have no problem whatsoever letting their many, many cats (at least 5, belonging to 3 families) roam loose in the neighborhood. I have come home to find as many as three strange cats sleeping on my porch at once. I have had to take many mortally injured birds and small animals to another neighbor (who hunts) to be put out of their misery. Those that do not receive a merciful dispatch from him are found as scattered remains, feathers mostly, across the lawn.

I love cats. At one time I had three. But I kept them all inside, dammit! We have complained many times, made frantic phone calls to tell them that "Blossom" has a chipmunk again, suggested collar bells, etc. The response is always the same: "Blossom would be so unhappy inside!"

Where did the cedar waxwings find shelter enough that they were comfortable as bait in my back yard? And the increasing number of cardinals and finches? In the back yard next to mine, which belongs to neither a neo-hippie nor a hunter, but to a chronically depressed older woman whom I see only at those moments when she opens her kitchen door to fling out bags of trash. This one home probably lowers the property values in my neighborhood by a good ten percent. Her porch is loaded down with old newspapers, rusty tools and broken chairs. The paint is peeling from the siding in long strips. The gutters hang off the eaves like broken branches on a tree. There is an old rusty air conditioner with a bird's nest in it hanging out of a rotten window frame on the second floor.

The back yard is no better. There are dead Christmas trees from years past piled against the house. A metal shed is rusting away in one corner. Bindweed has covered an old lawnmower and a wheelbarrow. When the mid-morning sun warms the thousand piles of dog poop left by her German shephard you'd better not stand downwind. She once had the torn-up remnants of an above-ground pool positioned carefully between the piles of poop, but we had to call the health department on that one: the mosquitoes breeding in there populated a 10-block radius.

But she has a huge pine, a wild, rambling rose bush that hasn't been pruned in decades, weed trees like ailanthus, walnut, and a scrubby little maple, and she never mows. The weeds top the fence by the end of summer. The birds love it. The worse it gets over there, the more birds I see.

We've been neighbors long enough that I don't see the trash any more, mostly. I'm pleased that something positive can come out of the situation. It's ever so much more pleasant to watch for birds than it is to call the health department every week.