The desk in my third floor apartment looks out on a large tree. Funny that in three years spent wandering a wooded area, I did not learn my trees better, and I don’t know what sort of tree this is. Perhaps as spring comes on and the leaves come out, it will be easier to tell. There are only a few trees, like the shag bark hickory and the birch, that I can identify by their bark.

Still, sitting at my desk I have already seen three different kinds of birds in my one tree, and this morning it was the setting for a nearly perfect moment. I was drinking tea and pondering the text of the book I’m working on. In the background the classical radio station began to play Respighi’s The Birds. A pair of pearly gray pigeons alighted, as if on cue, on a large branch just before me. They went into what can only be described, quite literally, as billing and cooing. They snuggled, they ran their bills through one another’s feathers, they moved a few inches apart and spent a minute feigning indifference, and then went into another round of affectionate bonding. Then the male hopped on the female’s back. He was off quickly. I couldn’t tell if he achieved his aim. After a few more minutes spent ducking their small heads together and rubbing wings, he was on top of her again, a little longer this time. Once off, they both sat unmoving for a few minutes. Then she slowly began to wander off, as if distracted by something she had to do. Once she had stepped about a foot away from her partner, she took wing. He followed suit a moment later, though notably, flying in a different direction.

Ah, what is love! In poetry, in our own imaginations, even in cartoons, we see these simple behaviors of birds and other animals as mimicking our own emotions. Surely all the fond rubbing of heads and fluffing of feathers is expressive of affection, like we would hold hands and embrace, whether or not it is leading inevitably to mating. But with these birds, it was leading inevitably to mating. I know little about the mating patterns of pigeons. Will they become a nesting pair, the male helping the female to feed and tend to her little ones once they are hatched? Or does he just fly off, perhaps to find another likely mate on another tree on a sunny Saturday morning?

It is one of the great questions and debates of animal behaviorists, whether the animals experience emotions as we know them. I only know that I was so absorbed in watching the pigeons that everything else stood still around me. I didn’t even notice when the Respighi piece concluded. And I don’t know if I was so taken by the scene out of simple interest in the birds’ behavior, or because I was projecting my own feelings of loneliness onto them. I think there can be nothing more difficult than scientific objectivity, especially when it concerns animal behavior.

Last night, well past midnight, I was awakened by what I took to be the sound of gunfire; five or six sharp cracks in quick succession. Startled awake I raised my head and listened for some result—screams, angry voices, sirens racing to the scene. All I discerned were perhaps some muffled laughs, and then the silence of the night closed around me again.

So this is life in the city, I thought. Gangs, guns in the hands of dangerous people, disorder and peril. But upon rising this morning I replayed the incident of the previous evening and recalled that in the three years I lived in the country, there was rarely a day that did not include the sound of gunfire, either in the distance or frighteningly close by. Random bangs that sounded like shotguns, the sharp crack of handguns, or the rapid fire of automatic weapons, drilling bullets into otherwise still Saturday or Sunday afternoons. Who knows, who can tell if these firearms were in the hands of responsible or irresponsible people? Why did I never worry that a crime was probably being committed, that someone was being gunned down? What is the difference, really, between hearing weapons fired in the country and in the city?

There is more noise in general in the city; it’s more traffic, mostly. And more light. Streetlights filter in through the still curtainless windows of my small apartment. There are way more streetlights than I consider necessary. You almost have to look up to see that it is night in the city, when only the sky is dark. Everything else is illuminated well enough to read fine print. In the country, night is dark. You can tell when the moon is full, or close to it, when you step out, without looking up to see it. The light fills the ambient darkness. You know why people in times past worshiped the moonlight, or spoke of its spiritual qualities, by the way its nearly physical presence envelops you. It would be nice if urban planners could design streetlights that dimmed in proportion to how much moonlight was available, so city dwellers could experience it.

I have smiled at, said hello to, or been ignored by more people in the past week than in the entire last three years. They are just there. I feel like Gomer Pyle, like someone who clearly does not belong, but wants to be accepted, putting my friendly face out there in an environment that does not always reward a forthcoming attitude. It’s hard to say if people in the country are kinder or more friendly; certainly that’s the stereotype, but there are so few instances to test the hypothesis that the idea must remain anecdotal at best. All I know is that wherever I am, I regard most people as pretty much the same; kindhearted and selfish by turns, and unpredictable once you put a gun in their hands.