There’s trouble in Paradise. It comes around every year about this time. The songbirds of spring are starting to arrive, but not yet the ones who live in the deep woods around the lake and our home. You see my dilemma. I like to go to the remote ramp early in the morning, well before sunrise, to be there when the earth awakens, but it’s a quiet ride through the winter and even now. On the other hand, although I live on the down slope of a hollow, there is a small neighborhood just above me on the up slope. And with neighborhoods come edges. Lawns running right to the edge of the still leafless forest. Edges are the perfect habitat for so many songbirds, and it is noisy with birdsong in the mornings this time of year, and will only get more musical over the next several weeks. So I am torn. Where to spend my mornings. Deep in the forest or wandering a small suburban landscape. It’s a yearly existential dilemma for me, solved every year by the arrival and song of the wood thrush in the deep woods that surround us here. But until then, well, it’s troubling. ~B