Everybody is a story.  Today I began to consider the possibility that every creature, every life form, is a story.  Midmorning I wandered for an hour down by the San Diego River. The river bottom runs through a busy valley from Mission Gorge out to the Pacific Ocean.  When someone asks me where I live in San Diego, the answer is Mission Valley.  Margaret and I live on a hill above the valley in a secure, lovely apartment with all the comforts a person could want.  Mission Valley is also a place where scores of homeless people live.  The first picture today is of such  spot.  If you look closely you’ll see a person on the other side of the rushes and shrubs.

  

A great variety of creatures who are not human live in Mission Valley.  I had the privilege today of watching a family of Goldfinches do some family business together.  As I was shooting the first picture, a goldfinch flitted back and forth across my field of vision several times before I finally figured out that it was concerned about my being in the little clearing that ended with the wall of rushes beside the river… then I saw movement in the grass in front of me.  Four adolescent goldfinches had left their nest, probably pushed from it by one or both the parent birds, and they were being watched carefully by an adult male and an adult female goldfinch.  I was interrupting a flying lesson.  As quickly as I could do it, I took these pictures and left the little family so they could get on with the business of staying alive.