Another cold morning: just one bee for all this goldenrod. The neighbors’ rooster like some teenage band member practicing for a pep rally.
September 2014
September 15, 2014
Droplets of fog, back-lit by the sun, stream upward into the blue like reverse rain. At the woods’ edge, a migrant phoebe clears its throat.
September 14, 2014
A cold morning. Two chipmunks calling 100 yards apart fall in and out of sync. Thin clouds block the sun before it ever reaches the porch.
September 13, 2014
The lilac trembles from without and within: rain hammers the leaves while birds jockey for shelter under them—towhee, cardinal, wren.
September 12, 2014
Just as the early goldenrod fades, the late begins to bloom. At the wood’s edge, the tulip poplar is having a conversation with itself.
September 11, 2014
I shift my boots on the railing, and the spider that had been keeping watch from its web retreats to the eaves and curls up like a fist.
September 10, 2014
It looks like rain, it smells like rain, but the morning passes without a drop. The goldfinches carry on being garrulous. A tree frog calls.
September 9, 2014
A pileated woodpecker comes yammering into the treetops and proceeds to groom, his clown-red crest flashing as he scratches under his wing.
September 8, 2014
A green darner zips back and forth, reversing direction so abruptly it looks like a jump cut. From behind the house, the burbling of a wren.
September 7, 2014
Hoarse cries of a lone Canada goose—I scan the sky and see nothing but blue. A monarch butterfly arcs through the shadows in the yard.
September 6, 2014
I sit scribbling in a notebook, a pearl crescent butterfly weaving between the legs of my chair. It comes to rest with one wing in the sun.
September 5, 2014
It’s hot. At last the annual cicadas sound fully charged. The air is alive with tiny insects in non-intersecting orbits back-lit by the sun.
September 4, 2014
The cloying smell of goldenrod from below the porch. A flower fly comes up to inspect my tan khaki trousers, hovering an inch from my knee.
September 3, 2014
At just half-light, the young rooster in the neighbors’ coop begins to crow. But the distant train whistle still has more depth, more soul.