Robin song echoes through the fog. My neighbor drives past on the tractor. In the wake of its rumble, a towhee’s eponymous call.
2019
April 5, 2019
Rain seasoned with sleet. The trapped balloons hang limply from their dead tree, wrinkled like over-ripe fruit.
April 4, 2019
Squirrels sound the predator alarm, and a song sparrow in the lilac stays motionless for minutes, until I’m half-convinced it’s just a burl.
April 3, 2019
The dead are restless, through no fault of their own: last year’s leaves shuffled about by the wind. But the sun is strong. A phoebe calls.
April 2, 2019
Neither hot nor cold, and the sun’s neither out nor in. The daffodil spears look just a little taller, and the moss maybe a bit more bright.
April 1, 2019
Wind turns the pages of my notebook. The sun is bright, and I’m feeling happy for the small woodpecker who’s found a very loud branch.
March 31, 2019
Snow mixed with sleet. The feral balloons have wrapped themselves more tightly around their tree—a classic trade of freedom for security.
March 30, 2019
Distant gunshots from the shooting range in the valley. The impression of rising excitement in a field sparrow’s song.
March 29, 2019
Warmish and rainy. From the valley to the east: a great blue heron with its sword-blade wings, its spring-loaded neck. A killdeer’s call.
March 28, 2019
Gnats are flying, and I think about the first insects, 340 million years before flowers—an alien earth preserved in these very hills.
March 27, 2019
The snowbank has shrunk to the size of a dog curled up on the dead grass. A tom turkey lets loose with his lust-gargle, his aggressive ache.
March 26, 2019
After a cold night, the gift of clarity: a mote of drifting cattail down visible at 100 yards. A raven croaking on high is echoed by a crow.
March 25, 2019
Trapped in a tree, two balloons bearing a picture of a basketball and the name of a school west of Pittsburgh rub their Mylar skins together.
March 24, 2019
Sun through thin clouds—dim as a lizard’s third eye. A red-tailed hawk drifts past without flapping.