Below the porch, a dot of pink: a very late dame’s-rocket blooming the day after a hard frost. A brown creeper inspects a small walnut tree.
October 2010
October 30, 2010
Now that summer’s past, the cardinal has gone back to harassing her reflection. The frost-whitened myrtle bed. A barberry turned to flame.
October 29, 2010
Halfway up the dead cherry beside the porch, a gray squirrel stops and stares, and I recall reading that squirrels are omnivorous as rats.
October 28, 2010
Sun blazes through a newly open woods, glossy on the backs of wild turkeys: nine hens and two jakes, who keep pausing to fan their tails.
October 27, 2010
An hour before dawn, a high thin cloud drifts northeast to the rumble of a freight train. When the half-moon intersects, a rainbow disc.
October 26, 2010
When the fog lifts, a flock of chickadees moves in, foraging in the mid-canopy, precipitating a shower of birch and locust leaves.
October 25, 2010
Just past daybreak, a pileated woodpecker whinnies, a nuthatch tuts, a crow croaks, and a gray squirrel clatters through gray branches.
October 24, 2010
All along the ridgetop now the sky is visible, cathedral-sized windows between the trees. The throaty roar of the neighbor’s pickup truck.
October 23, 2010
Mid-morning: the first patch of blue, little larger than a moon. In the old lilac below the other house, a Carolina wren bursts into song.
October 22, 2010
Halfway to the ground, a locust leaf reverses course and heads for the sky. The cattails whisper, a restive crowd, but the sun never comes.
October 21, 2010
Windy and clearing. Amidst all the twirlers and spiralers, one tulip poplar leaf plummets straight to the ground, folded like an umbrella.
October 20, 2010
I pick the last few unsplit witch hazel nuts in my garden, hoping I can witness their famed explosions. I line them up on top of my monitor.
October 19, 2010
When the fog lifts, the sun makes its nest in the treetops. I sit with a newspaper folded on my knee, listening to a chipmunk’s metronome.
October 18, 2010
Widely scattered drops of rain—a rustle twice as loud as it would’ve been a month ago. Blue jays yell back and forth about some new find.