Sunday August 29, 2010

As the plane fades in the distance, they return: a towhee, two lethargic vireos, a chipmunk’s water-drip-steady clucks, the garden cricket.

On this date

Dawn, and all the stream’s voices are raised. A squirrel finds a black walnut sticking out of a snowbank and races off with it. …

A crow mob on the move—their angry cries. Sun stripes the snow. I hold my head still to watch the slowly shifting points of glitter. …

Unseasonably warm. The first half of a song sparrow's song. Two titmice in the crabapple swipe their bills back and forth on their branches. …

The snow has gone slushy, turning the hollow from a soundproof room into an echo chamber. Over the traffic noise, a junco's cadenza. …

Fine snow settling over everything. From up in the woods, strange, high-pitched cries. Two crows fly off. The snow thickens. …

Sunny and cold. A chipmunk's awake, racing over the snow at the woods' edge. Icicles fall from the roof and shatter with a festive tinkling. …

From down-hollow, a pileated woodpecker comes yelling straight over the house, lands and falls silent, joining its mate to forage for grubs. …

A junco separated from its flock chirps noisily in the lilac. At the edge of the field, two crows do their frantic best to gin up a mob. …

The sun rises above a mass of cloud looming like the lost, real mountain for which this is a foothill. A wren pops out from under the porch. …

A wool-gray sky. This is not the blue morning we were promised! But tell it to the bluebirds warbling above the garage. …

Dim sun. Trunks and branches still sheathed in ice glisten, surrounded by duller companions like glitterati on the streets of New York. …

A cloudless morning. The squeaky chatter of winter finches, so forlorn on an overcast day, now seems like the sound of happiness itself. …

At first light, some large animal crunching through the snowpack at the woods' edge. It slows, stops. I wait for daybreak: nothing there. …

Trains going through the gap sound close: rain's on the way. A pileated comes yelling into the yard just as the first drops begin to fall. …

The Morning Porch