Sunday November 02, 2014

Windy and overcast, with a few flakes of snow in the air. Yellow leaves peel off the aspens as I watch. Two ravens croak back and forth.

On this date

November 26, 2021

Snow on the ground and in the air. When the wind eddies around to the east, a great flock of shriveled leaves lifts off from the lilac. …

November 26, 2020

A few blue fissures in the clouds. A tree sparrow explores the ridges and valleys of the corrugated steel roof over the oil tanks. …

November 26, 2019

Warmish. The sound of squirrel teeth chiseling into a black walnut. The red plastic hooks where hummingbird feeders hung shine in the sun. …

November 26, 2018

Fog moves back and forth over the snow as the rain thickens. Two hunters emerge, a girl and her grandfather—blaze-orange among the gray. …

November 26, 2017

The lilac leaves have faded and folded into a thousand variations on an origami wing, bird or bat or moth, ready for their one big flight. …

November 26, 2016

Two crows tail a small hawk on a high-speed chase through the trees, twisting and turning. It loses them and climbs into the clouds. …

November 26, 2015

Cloud cover thin as muslin sheet; the woods are anything but gloomy. A small brown moth flutters purposefully past. The neighbor's chainsaw. …

November 26, 2014

The silence of falling snow. It clings tight to everything, like any newborn. The neighbor's rooster can't believe it—he crows and crows. …

November 26, 2013

The silence of steadily falling snow, punctuated by the tapping of a downy woodpecker and the distant scolding of a squirrel. …

November 26, 2012

A nuthatch scolds something at the woods' edge. A few distant gunshots. You'd never know the hollow is full of hunters sitting in trees. …

November 26, 2011

Another warm morning. A Carolina wren pops out of the bridal wreath bush like a rabbit from a magician's hat and ascends the lilac, singing. …

November 26, 2010

Windy, with mottled gray and white clouds and a muddy yellow smudge for the sun, as in a fingerpainting. A siskin's sharp-edged note. …

November 26, 2009

As if giving thanks, the thin, wavering call of a white-throated sparrow. The dawn sky half-cloud, half-clear. A distant owl. …

November 26, 2008

Enough snow now to make the ground a blank page for the calligraphy of weeds and the meandering tracks of birds, the prints of their wings. …

November 26, 2007

—Every season is deer season; this is the opening day of rifle season. —Where are the rifles, then? —Zipped up in their cases, staying dry. …

The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow