The dame’s-rocket is at its height; my overgrown front yard is the equal of any garden. The catbird seems to concur.
Year: 2021
The black cherry blossoms are already fading, and the sun is going from dandelion-yellow to dandelion seedhead-white. Black-billed cuckoo.
Cool morning. The melancholy sweetness of a wood thrush song. At the woods’ edge, the small black cherry has gone to bloom.
Mid-morning and it’s already hot. The black locusts—last to leaf out—have a fresh green fuzz. A carpenter bee inspects the roof.
A nocturnal visitor has dug up four of my herbs, tunneling into the compost. Below the porch, a least flycatcher, handsome in his eye rings.
Even on a morning this incomparable I can be squinting at my phone and nearly miss the sun on a hummingbird’s back.
Up early enough for the last of the dawn fog and the wood pewee’s dreamy chant. Two rabbits graze side-by-side in the road.
The catbirds are much more furtive now going into the barberry that hides their nest. Two cuckoos call up a bit of rain.
Through the shining leaves, I gaze at the last shards of ridgetop sky, listening to a red-eyed vireo and wishing I’d gotten a bit more sleep.
The forest is so green it almost hurts to look at it, and it smells delicious, too: wild azalea’s honeysuckle scent. Two chipmunks’ warring metronomes.
Say what you will about cold spring nights; they lead to gorgeous mornings. And what’s that stunning black-and-white bird? Only a downy woodpecker.
The light this morning is so crystalline, the new leaves so intensely green, it’s no surprise to hear the year’s first oriole—that song.
Breezy and cool. Patches of blue sky begin to appear. The birds are relatively quiet—probably too busy eating after a cold night.
The stream is quieter than I would’ve thought after so much rain. The sun comes out, and the one ant tending to a peony bud moves her antennae.