The sun climbs through the big red maple. A young Carolina wren sits on the springhouse gable, still and quiet, just swiveling its head.
2012
August 6, 2012
Sunlight struggles through the haze. The large black-and-blue butterfly known as a red-spotted purple keeps returning to my red porch floor.
August 5, 2012
Just after daylight, the sound of a shower approaching and petering out before it reaches the porch. Two chickadees flit through the bushes.
August 4, 2012
Cool but humid. A vireo sings quietly, as if talking to himself. One of those quick, small flies cleans its wings with its hind-most legs.
August 3, 2012
Green blur: a hummingbird. Two or three pileated woodpeckers cackle back and forth. The meter reader’s truck, its flashing yellow light.
August 2, 2012
Again it takes a finger of sun to draw my attention to something in plain sight: the foxtail millet heads—tails?—bent low by their seeds.
August 1, 2012
A field cricket chirps and falls silent, but the tree crickets never stop trilling. A small, purple tuft lit up by the sun: Canada thistle.
July 31, 2012
A katydid that had been perched on my chair leg walks jerkily across the porch and stops in the shadow of a railing, outlandishly green.
July 30, 2012
A wood thrush fledgling lands on the lower bar of the fretwork spandrel, breast feathers disheveled, eyerings imparting a look of surprise.
July 29, 2012
Tiny ants are digging holes in the tansy flowers—yellow eyes with seething black pupils. A single-propeller plane: the sound of a clear day.
July 28, 2012
Sitting outside with my laptop, blind to the world. A phoebe flies past two feet from my nose, followed a minute later by a hummingbird.
July 27, 2012
A phoebe dives at a cabbage white butterfly and comes up short. It zigzags after it, hovers, snaps again: only a tiny piece of white wing.
July 26, 2012
The yark, yark of ravens skimming the trees, the low cloud ceiling just above. Crushing humidity. Vegetation still drips from a dawn storm.
July 25, 2012
Cloudless and cool. The only cricket sound is a low murmur. From up in the woods, the distant crashing of deer running through the laurel.