Here in the San Fernando Valley Nordhoff street, if one is driving west, evolves during the course of several miles from teeming apartments to tonier homes and the University. Farther along, it seems to stop at Corbin Avenue but drive south across the railroad tracks and you can turn right on it and proceed past homes which don't access it and light industrial zoning which does. Years ago a bypass was built to angle from just past Tampa Avenue, the designated half mile east of Corbin, and fly over the tracks and thus access the west finale of Nordhoff.

I was doing some shopping near the one end of the fly over and walked up to see a passenger train pass beneath me. From the brush on the last part of the embankment before the right of way honeybees swarmed. Not that many but the hovering along with periodic little flight circles told me something I'd learned from swarms lighting on the property when I worked at school facilities: probably a hive subset on the move. Maybe they'd settled; maybe on this benign and blue day, though nippy of night, they would move on. Difficult to say if, as in the schools, someone would take exception to their presence in this otherwise not so obvious spot and have them snuffed.

The school board policy was to call out bee keepers until the latter commenced charging. Hubris, I tell myself in this "sweet" retail and other seasons.

Passenger train by, I turned to head down hill when I heard a nursery rhyme as one might hear from a cell phone. Not anything I'd programmed, but still I was keyed up; a sibling had been texting me about going to the home Sunday for Mom's birthday. No, it was a catering truck at a ground level light industrial area the other side of the tracks.

Buzzing of bees, phones, trucks: different signals drawing different kinds of attention.