Cold wind salted with the first few snowflakes—that seasonal seasoning. Behind the ridgetop trees, a hint of blue sky.
2018
October 20, 2018
Now that I can see the quaking aspens, through bare walnut branches, I can hear them too: their constant whisper. Gauzy rain. A train horn.
October 19, 2018
The silence of a power outage gives way to the rumble of a generator. High overhead, the resident pair of ravens croak back and forth.
October 18, 2018
Clear and cold. Over the wind, the rustle of a squirrel bounding through waves of dead grass, and the high, thin calls of a lone waxwing.
October 17, 2018
Treetop leaves flipping back and forth—not waving but drowning in the deep blue sky. Sunlight from the window behind me illuminates my book.
October 16, 2018
No frost yet, but the woods’ edge is riddled with fresh chinks of sky. The squeaky rattle of a winter wren as it pops out of the weeds.
October 15, 2018
Just inside the woods a tall black locust leans at a steep angle, held up only by its neighbors. I remember hearing the crack, but not when.
October 14, 2018
Cold and heavily overcast. A jay switches from his own call to red-tailed hawk, then chickadee. In the meadow, white-throated sparrows.
October 13, 2018
Wind in the trees: that ghostly not-quite speech. In last night’s dream, a human centipede pacified its prey with cliches about self esteem.
October 12, 2018
As many hours as the wind has been blowing, a strong gust brings still more leaves. A tulip poplar samara helicopters almost to the porch.
October 11, 2018
Hard, steady rain—yet somehow certain small, filmy-winged insects still manage to fly. From the woods’ edge, a towhee’s eponymous call.
October 10, 2018
Endlessly flitting about the same patch of sun up in the woods, what looks like an enchanted moth must be a leaf caught by caterpillar silk.
October 9, 2018
A black-billed cuckoo skulks through the lilac, elegant despite its hunched posture, its pointy-winged flight. A blue-headed vireo calls.
October 8, 2018
Fog and a fine drizzle. A monarch butterfly, oranger than any leaf in view, glides past in the wrong direction. The cheep cheep of a peeper.