A harvestman stilting across the porch stops to poke each fallen walnut leaf. Up in the woods, the sudden squirrel rattle that means Hawk.
Year: 2010
Thick fog at daybreak, as if the bright moon of 2am had spread a kind of mildew over the mountain. Train whistle. A nuthatch’s nasal call.
Dawn breeze. The whine of tires from the highway over the ridge is punctuated by the heavy thwacks of falling walnuts.
I finally realize what sage leaves remind me of, rough with papillae, moist with dew: but for the gray-green color, they could be tongues.
Sitting in the garden while the porch’s new coat of paint dries, I notice the peony leaves too have turned red. A waxwing’s glossy calls.
A succession of anxious or querulous calls—nuthatch, crow, Cooper’s hawk, pileated woodpecker—until sunrise reddens the western ridge.
The valleys must be brimming over with fog. Clouds rise behind both ridges, but it’s blue overhead: a white-bread sandwich filled with sky.
Due to the drought, the goldenrod display is subdued this year—but birch are turning three weeks early. September will have its yellow.
Walnut at the tip of a bent-down limb: a squirrel gets close, retreats, tries again. Abandons the tree for an oak, tail twitching.
Birdcalls are distant, intermittent. I’m reading about Auschwitz and thinking, it’s vital to learn the names. Someday it may be all we have.
First rays of sun on the garden, and already a monarch is drinking from the half-opened asters, orange panes of its wings trembling, aglow.
Ground fog forms at dawn in the bottom corner of the meadow and quickly dissipates. The screech owl’s quaver gives way to soft thrush calls.
Rain at last! A gentle tapping on the roof. The parched aster in my garden half-opens its first purple eye.
I hear it before I see it through the trees, crackling and popping in the tinder-dry sticks and leaf litter: a small herd of deer.