Gloomy skies brighten. An enormous, seemingly dead cranefly dangling from a spiderweb flutters to life. I pull it free and it sails off.
September 2020
Tuesday September 29, 2020
Hard rain. My brain feels sluggish, despite coffee. A flash of lightning like the apotheosis of all this yellow.
Monday September 28, 2020
With each breeze, a shower of yellow leaves. Now and then a whole walnut leaf—spine and rib bones sinking together in this sea of air.
Sunday September 27, 2020
A walnut falls from a maple tree. Squirrel as surrealist. The mid-morning fog beginning to glow.
Friday September 25, 2020
Thin fog at sunrise. Four deer in the yard ignore me only to stamp and snort at a small black cat.
Thursday September 24, 2020
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
Wednesday September 23, 2020
A warmer morning; the blue sky harbors an ever-so-slight suggestion of haze. The sound of rodent teeth chiseling open a black walnut.
Tuesday September 22, 2020
Equinox. I spot some goldenrod, done flowering, turning yellow a second time. My mother stops by to tell me about a singing porcupine.
Monday September 21, 2020
Cool and clear. The witch hazel in front of the living room window, which I haven’t gotten around to pruning out, is already turning gold.
Sunday September 20, 2020
The dial thermometer’s red arrow has just missed 0°C. A black tiger moth caterpillar is curled by the stoop like a dropped comma.
Saturday September 19, 2020
Cold and clear. Jays call up in the woods: at least one oak must’ve defied the drought and held on to its acorns.
Friday September 18, 2020
First light. Ghostly figures in the meadow shrink into common snakeroot. The distant gargle of a truck jake-breaking off the interstate.
Thursday September 17, 2020
Dawn. Two wrens rustle awake inside the old hornets’ nest. A doe and her nearly grown fawn graze in the yard.
Wednesday September 16, 2020
Sun grown vague with haze from the burning of the west. The drone note of tree crickets, so much more introspective than cicadas.