I was lying in my bed this morning, more accustomed to the distant din of traffic than anything that would set my heart aflutter (I know. People don’t say “aflutter” in the real world, but excesses have to be allowed in the spring) when I heard a series of loud, melodic sounds outside my window.

Still floating in the netherworld between wakefulness and sleep, all that my mind could register was one word: Warble. Over and over again. Warble. Warble. Warble. My eyes popped open. Suddenly, it dawned on me. “That’s a bird!”

Then, a big smile suffused (another elaborate spring word) my face, and I thought, “A bird is warbling. The sound it is making literally is a warble. A few hundred years ago, someone strolling through a forest heard that birdsong and strung together a perfect sequence of syllables to describe it.”

Warble. Brilliant. Which got me thinking in general about people, words, and spring.

There is a chickadee at my birdfeeder this very ... I was going to say “moment,” but it just caught my eye and indignantly flew away. If a conspiracy of circumstances had forced me to come up with a name for that indignant bird, with my flat-footed imagination, I would probably have called it, “little black and white bird.”