Cold rain; the treetops disappearing into cloud. A Carolina wren lands on the railing with a beak full of leaves and a self-important air.
fog
5/1/2019
Mist. A fragment of blue in the top of an oak that could be a cerulean warbler. From the far ridge, the faint sound of a wood thrush.
4/6/2019
Robin song echoes through the fog. My neighbor drives past on the tractor. In the wake of its rumble, a towhee’s eponymous call.
3/10/2019
Crows call through the fog. I open my book to a haiku about crows calling through fog. Having melted a bit, the snow is again a blank page.
2/24/2019
Late morning and the rain stops, the fog lifts to reveal the same snow-clad mountain as before. The distant sound of an engine being revved.
2/7/2019
The creek is high and loud. I try to film the fog but it retreats. The sky appears behind the trees as if blinds had just been pulled.
2/5/2019
Small clouds rise from the decaying snowpack and drift off through the trees. In the yard, a vole’s tunnel system is beginning to emerge.
12/28/2018
Foggy and damp. Small flies—or large midges—drift back and forth. A few branches high in the big tulip tree appear to be freshly debarked.
12/21/2018
The fog slowly thins, revealing gray-green patches of rejuvenated lichen on tree trunks and limbs. The year pivots on its hinge.
12/15/2018
It’s our local Christmas Bird Count, so every drip of cold rain or moving shape off in the fog might be a bird. But none are.
12/2/2018
Thick fog, returning to the forest its foreignness—the sense that any sound could be a footfall, that the rain is a many-legged beast.
11/26/2018
Fog moves back and forth over the snow as the rain thickens. Two hunters emerge, a girl and her grandfather—blaze-orange among the gray.
11/6/2018
With birches and maples at the woods’ edge all bare, I can see unimpeded up the hillside to small clouds lost among the trees and the rain.
10/8/2018
Fog and a fine drizzle. A monarch butterfly, oranger than any leaf in view, glides past in the wrong direction. The cheep cheep of a peeper.