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.
Year: 2010
Windy and clearing. Amidst all the twirlers and spiralers, one tulip poplar leaf plummets straight to the ground, folded like an umbrella.
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.
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.
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.
One gusty day, and the forest is full of new sounds: here a squeak, there a moan, like an orchestra of broken instruments tuning up.
Through a new hole in the forest, the sun imparts a half-minute nimbus to a tree trunk on the crest of the ridge. Clouds race by.
Just as the sun strikes my face, in the corner of my eye a hawk sweeps into the woods. She ghosts past, flared tail orange among the leaves.
The black locusts are beginning to yellow as the black birches beside them deepen to orange, alive with kinglets and glowing in the rain.
I stroll down into the yard to examine grass blades outlined by the first, patchy frost, accompanied by my coffee’s pillar of steam.
Two titmice tumble off a branch, claws briefly locked, provoking rebukes from a chorus of chickadees. A breeze fails to disperse the fog.
Almost Cartesian, this grid of clouds: contrails at varying stages of decay. From up in the woods, wingbeats of some large bird.
The birches are astir with birds: migrant warblers, chickadees, and a kinglet darting from leaf to leaf, gold crown flashing among the gold.
Chipmunks cluck—a hillside of leaky faucets. Over by the powerline, a crow is venting what sounds like frustration: a hollow ach ach ach.