Up in the field, five black cattle—some valley neighbor’s escaped stock—emerge from the mist and pause at the sight of their shadows.
Year: 2008
Another gray morning. High against the clouds, a pair of ravens exchange triple croaks. The chipmunk in the garden scratches behind one ear.
Equinox. A flat-white sky, and for the first time I notice two maple trees at the woods’ edge already half infiltrated by orange, by red.
In the pre-dawn, Sunday-morning silence, the distant bellowing of a cow. A half moon glows through the fog — a thin milk.
A gray, cold morning. The rusty-hinge scolding of a squirrel multiplies and turns into a flock of grackles, pivoting on its thousand wings.
Gold is spreading from the goldenrod up into the trees, here and there: walnut, elm, birch. A jay dives into the lilac: blue from the sky.
In the pre-dawn dark, a patch of moonlight appears for a few seconds on the end of the porch. A cricket’s one-string fiddle, slow and thin.
Clear, cold, the kind of morning where you can hear for miles, noisy with cars, trucks, trains, jets, and chipmunks standing their ground.
Up too early, I sit out front and watch the full moon moving in and out of thin clouds: moments of clarity interspersed with bleariness.
Where daffodils bloomed in April, goldenrod sways—a more worldly yellow. The distant hurricane makes a roosting monarch flap its wings.
Pulling rampant stiltgrass out of the garden next to the porch to create a spot for a potted yellow mum, I uncover the jawbone of a horse.
If this were my first dawn here, I might startle at the white faces in the darkness: snakeroot. The familiar cries of a bird I cannot name.
A warm night. With no inversion layer, dawn comes quietly except for the ever-present crickets. A patter of rain approaches and retreats.
5:30. The black cat is only distinguishable by its movement up the driveway, and only if I focus a little to the side. The sound of engines.