Thin fog. A lone blue jay’s querulous call. A tiny white moth flies past, its wings a blur. One expects to hear the purr of a tiny motor.
Year: 2018
Overcast and cool. I trace the passage of what must be a hawk through the woods by the fast-moving ripple of squirrel alarms.
Mid-morning, and the trees still glisten from the dawn fog. A breeze sends hundreds of birch leaves swirling out into the meadow.
Somewhere nearby, the bugling of geese. A red-breasted nuthatch goes up and down each branch of a small walnut. Mosquito: a blur on my nose.
Over at the neighbors’, a chainsaw whines and grumbles through a tree, waves of noise rising and falling like the years. A distant crow.
A half moon high overhead, fading as the fog rises off the meadow. A nuthatch lands on the dead elm’s smooth trunk and turns all about.
A blue jay flies across the sun, wings momentarily turning white. I see that the Virginia creeper on the springhouse roof has gone rust-red.
A rare sunshiny morning. A blaze-orange cap emerges from the woods: the resident naturalist, bearing a bag full of maitake mushrooms.
Cold and damp. The distant rumble of the heating oil truck’s diesel engine coming up the hollow. Voices of crows. Voices of children.
Overcast and cool. Birds only call at intervals now. Crickets’ chirps are as small and repetitive as the blossoms on the white heath aster.
The rain has stopped but the creek keeps singing like a drunk going home from a party. The sun comes out and all the house’s windows fog up.
In the overgrown garden, two soapwort flowers drip with rain. The small book of haiku I’m reading is perfect for swatting mosquitoes.
The flat white sky prompts me to notice that the white snakeroot—a plant that clouds up the meadow, being toxic to deer—has gone to seed.
Off to the northeast, a thin band of clear sky for the dawn to tint. A squirrel drops a walnut from the treetops. The catbird starts to mew.