‘Cover Stories’ Archives
CAROLING WITH CROWS Phillips Neighborhood, Christmas 2016
BY THOMAS R. SMITH Some people came out to greet us, others held back, facades preserving a solemn silence, whether of privacy, vacancy or sorrow. Yet smiles escaped our little roving chorus, whether for our stumbles over the carols”' verses in Spanish, or for having lit a few faces in windows and doorways of South Minneapolis. Lifting my gaze from twilight pavement and shadowed porches. I”'m not sure when it happened. I suddenly saw them, crows, hundreds, maybe thousands in the burnt- orange dusk, surrounding us in all directions, clustered crows enough to re-leaf the bare trees, great black choir-lofts of crows, their dark notes strung on staves of the sky. Overhead, too, crows everywhere, flapping through the lurid, smudged air like ash from some vast burning which perhaps was after all simply the crows¹ Christmas, their excitable cawing and clacking a kind of caroling above our earthbound song, urging us out from our less visible darkness [...]
