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
8/30/2012
Cold and clear. A whitish gnat zigzags toward the woods, following a sunbeam, like an anadromous fish ascending its native creek.
8/29/2012
Around the side of the house, a male goldfinch gorges on spicebush berries—silent for once, as if unwilling to share his find.
8/28/2012
Cool and clear except for a few scraps of cloud and a pair of ravens high overhead, their hollow, metallic croaks like steampunk crows.
8/27/2012
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.
8/26/2012
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.
8/25/2012
A small brown butterfly flutters low over the porch floor, checking out the three brown walnut leaflets, one of which trembles in its wake.
8/24/2012
A murky sunrise. Gnatcatchers high in the tulip tree dart and hover, tiny silhouettes against a cross-hatch of stratus clouds.
8/23/2012
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.
8/22/2012
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.
8/21/2012
Tent caterpillar webs billow, white as sails—still full of the dawn fog. Two nuthatches kvetch back and forth at the woods’ edge.
8/20/2012
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.
8/19/2012
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.
8/18/2012
A hawk circles over the ridge, higher and higher, until it appears smaller and fainter than the white blood cells criss-crossing my retina.