Blue jays yelling in the treetops. Wind speed is less than three knots, but still there’s a steady shower of yellow walnut leaves.
August 2012
August 30, 2012
Cold and clear. A whitish gnat zigzags toward the woods, following a sunbeam, like an anadromous fish ascending its native creek.
August 29, 2012
Around the side of the house, a male goldfinch gorges on spicebush berries—silent for once, as if unwilling to share his find.
August 28, 2012
Cool and clear except for a few scraps of cloud and a pair of ravens high overhead, their hollow, metallic croaks like steampunk crows.
August 27, 2012
A pileated woodpecker comes cackling into the dead elm, then quietly gets to work: hop down the trunk a few inches, listen for ants, repeat.
August 26, 2012
A squirrel hangs by its hind feet to pick a pair of walnuts, drops one, climbs off with the other in its teeth. The day darkens into rain.
August 25, 2012
A small brown butterfly flutters low over the porch floor, checking out the three brown walnut leaflets, one of which trembles in its wake.
August 24, 2012
A murky sunrise. Gnatcatchers high in the tulip tree dart and hover, tiny silhouettes against a cross-hatch of stratus clouds.
August 23, 2012
Sound is out of the east. And even first thing in the morning, the machines at the quarry sound tired. They bellow. They groan. They keen.
August 22, 2012
Sunbeams through the fog. The thin bull thistle beside the road with its one purple head sways ever so slightly into and out of the light.
August 21, 2012
Tent caterpillar webs billow, white as sails—still full of the dawn fog. Two nuthatches kvetch back and forth at the woods’ edge.
August 20, 2012
9:40. The strange, pipe organ-like moan of a steam locomotive blowing the Plummer’s Hollow crossing raises the hair on the back of my neck.
August 19, 2012
I get up to pick the ripe berries on the spicebush in my garden. Allspice aroma wafts up from the red drupes as I pinch them off the twigs.
August 18, 2012
A hawk circles over the ridge, higher and higher, until it appears smaller and fainter than the white blood cells criss-crossing my retina.