Warm and humid; the birds are more vocal than they’ve been in days. A squirrel slinks across the forest floor, foraging only in the shade.
Year: 2016
A hummingbird lands on my red iPad cover and probes the fold with her bill at one end, then the other, while I read an article on the NSA.
Clear and cool. The orb-weaving spider whose web spans the end of the porch hides against the house with only her gray underside showing.
The buzz of a hummingbird sizing up her reflection in a porch window. From behind the house, a Carolina wren’s incessant harangue.
Sun shimmers on a tangle of frizzy brown hair snagged on a nail. I release it into the yard—good nesting material for some small mammal.
Cool and autumnal. In the overgrown garden, a faded spicebush swallowtail searches the faded orange cups of butterfly milkweed for a drink.
A heavy sky, gravid with rain. In the town a mile and a half way, a fire siren—that hortatory wail. Then the ululations of the trucks.
The clouds of white snakeroot in my yard host one tiger swallowtail, glamorous as a celebrity in a trailer court. A raven’s metallic croak.
Five cabbage whites gadding about in the garden draw my attention to a tangle of crested buckwheat, red stems threaded through the bergamot.
The sudden crash of a limb breaks the stillness. A red admiral butterfly lands beside my book, wings opening and closing—a wilder text.
A warm morning, and all I hear are the birds of winter: chickadee, nuthatch, pileated woodpecker. A dead cranefly dangles from a spiderweb.
Cool with a scrim of cloud. From high in the canopy, a scarlet tanager’s hoarse song—the first in weeks. A sudden sweet smell I can’t place.
A female hummingbird leaves the beebalm to check out the red lettering on my t-shirt, a sleek green torpedo hovering inches from my chest.
The cicada chorus ebbs and swells. I notice the big tulip tree has shed all its drought-yellowed leaves from a month ago and is green again.