A thought, brought on by the morning chorus as sung by a neighboring murder.

The summer heat crept into my window, driven by the calls of crows. In a large pine tree a family, a murder, trains new fledglings to feed and fly. I am reminded of a story I learned a long time ago, back when I learned that love and expense were tied into one word: Maganda.

As the story goes, when the world first began, there was no land, only the sea and the sky, and between them was a crow — Black as the space between stars. One day the crow grew tired of flying around. There was no land.

Thinking on the wind, she began to stir up the sea with her wings, until the sea threw its waters against the sky. The sky, in return, tossed thousands of islands into the sea to restrain it. Soon the sea could no longer raise. Instead the sea began to flow back and forth, making a tide that beat to the rhythm of the crow’s wings.

Then the sky spoke.

“Crow, go and land on one of the islands. Build a nest and leave the sea and I in peace!”

As my Nanay told it, from then on the crow lived happily ever after with the other birds on islands between the sea and the sky.

That must have been the first summer of crows.