A few years ago, a guy who was doing some work for us gave us a traffic light. It’s a real traffic light, which has been re-wired so that when you plug it into an ordinary outlet, all three lights come on. We rarely turn the thing on, but there it sits, out on our deck, and I suppose it fits in with the train set and the garden sculpture and the imagination stations.

There is a hole in the top of the traffic light, and each year a family of starlings builds a nest and has a bunch of babies in there, around the red light. Last week they hauled out some residual materials from last year, something I haven’t seen before, and now they’re busily building a new nest.