The yelling of a crow unable to raise a mob. Sun glints on caterpillar silk strung like abandoned bunting among bare walnut-tree branches.
October 2015
Tuesday October 20, 2015
Warm, with a bleary sun. Three deer file out of the woods: a doe with grown fawns. She pauses to browse the leaves on a feral privet bush.
Monday October 19, 2015
Last night’s heavy frost retreats to the shade. By 10:30, sparrows are bathing in the stream, shaking themselves dry in the sunlit dogwood.
Sunday October 18, 2015
The thermometer’s big arrow points straight at 0°C. It was too windy for frost, but fallen red maple leaves cradle white grains of ice.
Saturday October 17, 2015
Sun shining through rain: to the small birds in the treetops, the porch must be ringed in a rainbow. Then it turns to sleet.
Friday October 16, 2015
Cloudy and cold. A bluebottle fly clings to a porch column, stopped head pointing at five o’clock. Four geese go over—a confusion of honks.
Thursday October 15, 2015
Pileated woodpeckers fly back and forth cackling, their wings black and white as newsprint amid the cathedral-window colors of the leaves.
Wednesday October 14, 2015
Color is creeping into the tall oaks: here a splash of deep orange, there a branch gone burgundy, and just above, a pale smudge of sun.
Tuesday October 13, 2015
A cold wind. The first holes have appeared in the golden wall of leaves at the woods’ edge, the winter-white, ridgetop sky leaking through.
Monday October 12, 2015
Another cool and cloudless morning. The hollow echoes with the croaks of ravens. A pileated woodpecker taps on the side of my house.