The hush of snow against leaves like soft brushes playing on the skin of a drum. A chickadee calls, and then a nuthatch. Dee dee. Yank yank.
October 2009
10/16/2009
A wet blanket of snow has crushed the lilac and bowed down the flaming maples and still-green oaks. Every 30 seconds another crack or crash.
10/15/2009
Cold rain rattles in the leaves. On the side of the house, an assassin bug with huge hind legs—about to die, it seems, with his boots on.
10/14/2009
A patch of silver in the yard: first frost. A jet glints in the rising sun, its short contrail twice as bright as the crescent moon.
10/13/2009
Rising late, I listen to loggers’ chainsaws from over the ridge to the west. The trees are almost at their peak of color. A distant crash.
10/12/2009
Now I realize why the Adirondacks seemed so quiet: no jays! One reconnoiters the porch, pivoting in front of my chair with an odd screech.
10/11/2009
Cold and clear. Stripes of sunlight don’t distinguish between the gold on the trees and the gold already on the ground: everything glows.
10/10/2009
Coming back from the Adirondacks, I find a different mountain: much redder and yellower than it was a week ago, and much less mountainous.
10/4/2009
[Gone camping in the Adirondacks. Back in five or six days.]
10/3/2009
Thick fog. Silence punctuated by the muffled thuds of black walnuts landing on the lawn. The distant, mad cackle of a pileated woodpecker.
10/2/2009
Cold drizzle. The burble of a song sparrow. A flycatcher of indeterminate species flutters up from the foxtail millet beside the stream.
10/1/2009
A sudden commotion of geese. I run to scan the sky out of habit, as if they were migratory, and their “V” still a horn open to the north.