The Morning Porch is on hiatus until March 6. Feel free to leave your own front-porch observations in the comments.
February 2012
2/27/2012
A downy woodpecker gleans breakfast from the dead cherry, chirping between taps. A mackerel sky. The smell of thawed earth.
2/26/2012
Pileated woodpeckers forage on all sides, hammering, drumming, cackling, whooping. I feel as if I’m surrounded by a troupe of insane clowns.
2/25/2012
Snow blows sideways and rises from the ground in snaky spirals. A Carolina wren dances on top of the stone wall like a wind-up toy.
2/24/2012
Rain has erased the last patches of snow. The lilac bush gives birth to a cardinal, a wren, four white-crowned sparrows and a chipmunk.
2/23/2012
A killdeer’s song drifts down from high overhead, and to the south, the piping of a ragged flock of geese struggling against the high winds.
2/22/2012
Dawn. Three deer become two, become three again. The sound of squirrel teeth on black walnut shell—that harsh madman’s whisper.
2/21/2012
Sunrise. The bluebird warbles once, as if unsure whether it really will be that kind of day. The cardinal keeps singing his one good note.
2/20/2012
Querulous cries of a raccoon, like lost notes from a soprano clarinet. Two pileateds hammer for their breakfast—an arrhythmic percussion.
2/19/2012
First light. The silence is broken by a rustle in the leaves, followed a little later by the hollow sound of a creek stone being flipped.
2/18/2012
The sun glints off periwinkle leaves in the yard where snow has just melted. All sounds come from a great distance: crow, woodpecker, train.
2/17/2012
Blue sky. The snow has retreated to the northwest-facing hillside under the shelter of the trees. A train’s whistle made wavery by the wind.
2/16/2012
Sleet rattles on the roof like a fast typist. Two deer in the springhouse meadow: when they stop moving, they vanish into the brown weeds.
2/15/2012
Out before dawn, I hear nothing but the drip of melting snow, gaze at a photographic-negative version of the woods: light ground, black sky.