Returning home and settling in, I realized a correlation to the at least five dead birds we saw… Bird flu. A sign.

But in the moment we encountered them, we never made the correlation. But I guess that is the purpose of these unrelenting news assaults. We don't make these connections as we should.

I was traveling, focused on getting The Dog to do their business and get back on our way, and didn’t think too much of it, just the old mantra to “keep Dog away from dead animals. Germs and disease.”

I was driving with The Dog between the East Coast and Midwest over the last couple of weeks, and at spots all along the way, rest stops, hotels, etc., walking the dog, we’d see dead birds in the grass. Not lying on their side or partially eaten. But seated in the grass, dead as they sat.

One frustrating thing about the recent assault of toxic news stories over the last weeks is that two things that should have been easily recognized as correlated in a less distracting time go uncorrelated.