Monday September 21, 2015

The wind is out of the east, and, slight as it is, carries an acrid, chemical smell from the sewage plant and the quarry’s dull roar.

On this date

Seven cardinals—three pairs and a lone male—take turns drinking from the stream, then perch in the lilac's bare branches, four feet apart. …

Clear and cold. As the sun climbs higher, the blue deepens. Yesterday's thin snow clings to the porch floorboards when I try to sweep. …

Gloomy, but the birds seem excited, perhaps sensing an approaching storm. A titmouse fleeing a fight lands on a maple limb red with fungus. …

Mid-morning and the trees are starting to shed their latest coat of snow. A pileated woodpecker, too, comes loose, and flaps off cackling. …

Fog heightens the intrigue of January's gray-squirrel soap opera: the slow-motion chases, the tree-top fights, the ruses to elude stalkers. …

A cold, gray morning. Up in the woods, a chickadee's two-note song prompts a cardinal to join in. The sun's hiding place begins to glow. …

The sun fades from blaze to smolder to smear. I notice a bent-down cherry limb that looks like a dancer—something I won't be able to un-see. …

A line of tracks from under the porch to the creek and back look like the prints a very small man walking on his hands would make: raccoon. …

Cold rain drips in the pre-dawn darkness. The wail of a locomotive sounds frighteningly close and full of an obscure, mechanical longing. …

A titmouse lands in the cherry, the streak in his breast the same rust as a tree sparrow's cap, a broomsedge stem, these icicles at sunrise. …

Fog. A distant chainsaw in one direction and in the other, rodent teeth. Amorous squirrels race back and forth over the white ground. …

Sparrow tracks in the thin snow under my chair: I see dandelion seeds on the wind. The house shivers all over when the furnace kicks on. …

Gray sky with streaks of blonde. A house finch turning its squeaky wheel goes all up and down the scale—a tangle of notes. …

The Morning Porch