Saturday October 09, 2010

Dave Bonta October 9, 2010

Chipmunks cluck—a hillside of leaky faucets. Over by the powerline, a crow is venting what sounds like frustration: a hollow ach ach ach.

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Dawn. A gull flies sideways below lowering clouds. The silhouette of a small cat appears on the wall behind the neighbor's bird feeder. …

Cold and gray. A deer snorts again and again over at the neighbors'—bear? Bobcat? Coyote? In the other direction, a sparrow hawk zips past. …

A hint of winter in the way the dead cattail leaves hiss and rattle. But in the garden, a few coneflowers still brandish tattered suns. …

Sun through thin, high clouds—light for a much milder morning than this one in which periwinkle leaves glitter with melting hoarfrost. …

Every morning, the carpet of sunlight on the forest floor grows a little larger. The steady rasp of squirrel teeth on black walnut shells. …

A katydid clings to the side of the house at sunrise, its veined leaf of a body immobile in the cold but still as green as July. …

Cold and clear. Half the trees on the ridge are bare now, leaving narrow, blue windows all along the crest for the sun to pour through. …

Gray sky, gray woods. The same stream-bank barberry that was the first thing to green up in April is now the last to glow a fiery orange. …

The walk is shiny with recent rain, and the west wind is damp and full of sounds from the valley: tires humming, the heavy thrum of a train. …

When the fog lifts, a flock of chickadees moves in, foraging in the mid-canopy, precipitating a shower of birch and locust leaves. …

Most of the edge and understory trees are bare now, and I can see under the oak canopy clear to the crest of the ridge and the sky beyond. …

Blue sky morning. A goldfinch flock moves down the ridge on its squeaky wheel. I'm not, I realize, an optimist; I'm in love with optimism. …

The Morning Porch/Patio