The rain stops but the trees go on dripping. The sky brightens. Through newly bare spicebush branches, I can see the springhouse once again.
October 2021
October 30, 2021
Fog. A squirrel is peeling ribbons of bark from the branches of the big tulip tree. And all these years I’ve been blaming porcupines!
October 29, 2021
On a dark morning, fall colors that seemed bland yesterday are bright embers. Behind the still-green lilac, a deer’s pale legs.
October 28, 2021
Mercury rises just as the stars begin to fade. A jet flies under it. A lone goose flies over it. I look away and lose it in the dawn sky.
October 27, 2021
The slender reed of a white-throated sparrow’s voice trembles in the wind. A hole opens in the clouds, blue and sunrise pink.
October 26, 2021
Breezy drizzle mixing in with falling leaves—those that twirl, those that spiral, those that somersault, those that glide.
October 25, 2021
Gibbous moon overhead through a thin veil of fog. A breeze moves through the forest, liberating the night’s rain.
October 24, 2021
Four small patches of blue sky huddle together like blue sheep in a white woolen sky. The wingbeats of crows.
October 23, 2021
A dark and rainy dawn. One especially well-harmonized train horn and the sparrows and wrens wake up.
October 22, 2021
Gloomy with a few drops of rain. I spot a new-to-me Virginia creeper six feet from the porch: that crimson.
October 21, 2021
The last clear morning for a while. A red-tailed hawk flies through the bare birches, trailed by two outraged crows.
October 20, 2021
Sunrise inches forward, chirp by chirp: towhee, white-throated sparrow. A rabbit gazes at me from the end of the porch with eyes dark as cisterns.
October 19, 2021
With the understory losing its leaves, the forest is threadbare, shot through with light. In the herb bed, a volunteer tomato is in bloom.
October 18, 2021
Sunrise. Fingers of orange light through orange leaves. After the furnace cycles off, the silence seems enormous.