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
9/29/2020
Hard rain. My brain feels sluggish, despite coffee. A flash of lightning like the apotheosis of all this yellow.
9/28/2020
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.
9/27/2020
A walnut falls from a maple tree. Squirrel as surrealist. The mid-morning fog beginning to glow.
9/25/2020
Thin fog at sunrise. Four deer in the yard ignore me only to stamp and snort at a small black cat.
9/24/2020
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
9/23/2020
A warmer morning; the blue sky harbors an ever-so-slight suggestion of haze. The sound of rodent teeth chiseling open a black walnut.
9/22/2020
Equinox. I spot some goldenrod, done flowering, turning yellow a second time. My mother stops by to tell me about a singing porcupine.
9/21/2020
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.
9/20/2020
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.
9/19/2020
Cold and clear. Jays call up in the woods: at least one oak must’ve defied the drought and held on to its acorns.
9/18/2020
First light. Ghostly figures in the meadow shrink into common snakeroot. The distant gargle of a truck jake-breaking off the interstate.
9/17/2020
Dawn. Two wrens rustle awake inside the old hornets’ nest. A doe and her nearly grown fawn graze in the yard.
9/16/2020
Sun grown vague with haze from the burning of the west. The drone note of tree crickets, so much more introspective than cicadas.