Falling snow infiltrated by sleet—that clicking like a room full of typists. A jay has sole custody of the color blue—his two-note solo.
November 2018
11/14/2018
Two degrees below freezing. The sun is a bright smear in what could be a snow sky. A chickadee sings seemingly to itself.
11/13/2018
Two oak leaves are caught by a birch, one after the other. From somewhere in the clouds, the buzzing rattle of a plane with a loose part.
11/12/2018
A few, tiny patches of snow linger behind clumps of dead stiltgrass. The sun blazes through the thinning crown of an oak; I start to sneeze.
11/11/2018
Over the rumble of my furnace, the cries of tundra swans: a long, trembling thread of them high in the blue, wings sparkling like snow.
11/10/2018
First snowfall of the year—a quarter inch. Newly fallen oak leaves roll across it, or scuttle like crabs on their curled lobe-tips.
11/9/2018
A sudden fusillade of sleet. Just audible over the rattle: a blue jay doing its imitation of a red-tailed hawk.
11/8/2018
All the most supine stiltgrass has grown white fur in the night. Two nuthatches foraging at the woods’ edge react badly to my sneeze.
11/7/2018
It’s morning in America, and I’m looking at a deep blue sky and a hillside of oaks—rust-red leaves still hanging on. They glow in the sun.
11/6/2018
With birches and maples at the woods’ edge all bare, I can see unimpeded up the hillside to small clouds lost among the trees and the rain.
11/5/2018
The big dead elm has collapsed into the stream, its rain-slick bole broken in two places. A drenched phoebe hawks insects in the grass.
11/4/2018
Yard seething with birds: sparrows, chickadees, a brown creeper. A raven flies past with something in its bill, wings going pfft pfft pfft.
11/3/2018
Oak leaves that turned brown just a few days ago already rattle instead of rustling. A hunter in gray camouflage emerges from the woods.
11/2/2018
A sparrow hawk makes two small, fast circles over the ridge, just like a real hawk. A barberry bush has this year’s only flaming foliage.