Steady rain—a gloomy sunrise. The big dead maple next to the road has the palest bark, its faces gone blank as masks.
12/9/2023
Red at dawn, and red again at sunrise for the last day of regular firearms deer season. Finally, at fifteen minutes past sunrise, a rifle booms. Then silence again.
12/8/2023
The moon’s bright bowl full of darkness rises through the trees at dawn and vanishes into clouds. Two great-horned owls on the valley side of the mountain carry on duetting.
12/7/2023
A dusting of snow—not even enough to bury the moss. Three gray squirrels in a high-speed chase circle the bole of an oak, claws on bark like castanets.
12/6/2023
Some breaks in the clouds around sunrise. The wail of a fire engine on the wind. Snowflakes drift down.
12/5/2023
A gloomy dawn lightened by brief scatterings of sleet. The muffled notes of a Carolina wren issue from a hole in the road bank.
12/4/2023
A mottled gray sky all the way to the horizon, not brightening even for the sunrise, let alone for the crows with their many complaints or the red-bellied woodpecker jeering from the top of a black locust.
12/3/2023
Steady rain. An hour past sunrise the sky brightens a little, and the trees in their green sleeves of lichen begin to glow.
12/2/2023
Fog hides the sunrise, apart from a small opening on the ridgetop that fills with golden light. Then the gray curtain comes down again.
12/1/2023
It’s just two degrees above freezing, but after days of cold, I feel overdressed. Juncos twitter softly by the springhouse. Raindrops begin tapping on the porch roof.
11/30/2023
An aging contrail stretches toward a sun half-hidden by cloud—fuzzy point at the end of an exclamation mark. Three crows take their argument elsewhere. The furnace under the house shivers to life.
11/29/2023
Bitter cold—and the silence that comes with it. I can hear a squirrel’s claws on bark halfway up the ridge. A raven croaks twice.
11/28/2023
A scurf of snow on the ground. A few fat clouds, barely moving, turn orange. A lone crow in the treetops coos like a dove.
11/27/2023
Gray and windy. The cedar tree moans against the house. A tulip poplar seed capsule comes spinning in and lands on my shoulder.