Cold wind salted with the first few snowflakes—that seasonal seasoning. Behind the ridgetop trees, a hint of blue sky.
Year: 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.
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.
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.
Treetop leaves flipping back and forth—not waving but drowning in the deep blue sky. Sunlight from the window behind me illuminates my book.
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.
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.
Cold and heavily overcast. A jay switches from his own call to red-tailed hawk, then chickadee. In the meadow, white-throated sparrows.
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.
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.
Hard, steady rain—yet somehow certain small, filmy-winged insects still manage to fly. From the woods’ edge, a towhee’s eponymous call.
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.
A black-billed cuckoo skulks through the lilac, elegant despite its hunched posture, its pointy-winged flight. A blue-headed vireo calls.
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.