A katydid that had been perched on my chair leg walks jerkily across the porch and stops in the shadow of a railing, outlandishly green.
July 2012
7/30/2012
A wood thrush fledgling lands on the lower bar of the fretwork spandrel, breast feathers disheveled, eyerings imparting a look of surprise.
7/29/2012
Tiny ants are digging holes in the tansy flowers—yellow eyes with seething black pupils. A single-propeller plane: the sound of a clear day.
7/28/2012
Sitting outside with my laptop, blind to the world. A phoebe flies past two feet from my nose, followed a minute later by a hummingbird.
7/27/2012
A phoebe dives at a cabbage white butterfly and comes up short. It zigzags after it, hovers, snaps again: only a tiny piece of white wing.
7/26/2012
The yark, yark of ravens skimming the trees, the low cloud ceiling just above. Crushing humidity. Vegetation still drips from a dawn storm.
7/25/2012
Cloudless and cool. The only cricket sound is a low murmur. From up in the woods, the distant crashing of deer running through the laurel.
7/24/2012
Six times in a row, the wood pewee chimes in right after the field sparrow. Don’t tell me birds don’t sing in part for the pleasure of it.
7/23/2012
A sleek black-and-yellow potter wasp is visiting the bergamot, biting a hole in the base of each drooping floret to suck the nectar.
7/22/2012
Even in flight, the cuckoos skulk: two pairs of thin wings as fast and silent as a burglar’s gloves. A small red beetle circles the yard.
7/21/2012
Spiderwebs in the meadow and the big rosettes of mullein leaves next to the road glisten with their haul of beads from last night’s rain.
7/20/2012
A deer leaps and twists in the tall grass to elude a fly, his damp pelt pale as a salmon, hoarse breathing just audible above the rain.
7/19/2012
The sound of a hummingbird at full throttle: a male rocketing back and forth in front of the cedar tree for a hidden female audience of one.
7/18/2012
Distant thunder. A black ichneumon wasp walks circles on the porch floor, its wings flickering jerkily like images in a silent film.