The sudden buzz of a hummingbird rocketing back and forth in a mad parabola of attraction, the female watching from a dead lilac limb.
June 2015
6/29/2015
Clear skies at last. In the middle of the yard, the gurgling of an underground spring beside the dead wild rose bush where a phoebe perches.
6/28/2015
Garlic heads in the yard are beginning to uncurl—curved arrows pointing in all directions. But the rain still follows its straight road.
6/27/2015
Fragments of vireo and goldfinch song mingle with the rain’s thunderous applause. A few filmy-winged insects still somehow manage to fly.
6/26/2015
Gray sky in which the sun slowly surfaces like a carp in a murky pond. Rain-slick leaves glisten. A great spangled fritillary zigzags past.
6/25/2015
Weak sunlight: a milkiness in the sky like the film that forms over the eyes of the dead. A lone fawn runs bleating through the forest.
6/24/2015
Bright sun and the clearest air in weeks. The familiar woods 50 feet away is a dark wall with here and there a loophole of intense green.
6/23/2015
An early-morning storm rumbles off to the north. Flashes of scarlet: tanager at the woods’ edge, ruby-throated hummingbird at the beebalm.
6/22/2015
Sunrise, and the cricket music is augmented by a trio of chipping sparrows, the fledgling begging for food while its parents mate.
6/21/2015
The light between showers. A groundhog plows through the stiltgrass in the yard. Later, two chipmunks touch noses at the end of the porch.
6/20/2015
A question mark butterfly on the railing next to my boots. A cuckoo’s soft call sounds like an answer to the incessant caws of a crow.
6/19/2015
Unsettled weather; the leaves on the trees turn this way and that. Two turkey vultures circle high above the ridge, rocking in the wind.
6/18/2015
I look up from my book and realize it’s raining again, a downward shimmer. I try forgetting the names of unseen birds—this buzz, that cry.
6/17/2015
A squirrel stymied in crossing the porch by my unexpected presence approaches warily, watching me the way a farmer watches the weather.