Rain and the first daffodils: April has come early. Fog appears and disappears among the trees. The robin unspools a silver thread of song.
Year: 2021
Sun climbing every tree at once. A hollow snag mutters like a stomach with its cargo of squirrels.
Sunny and warm with high winds, as if March’s proverbial lion and lamb were the same. Trees sway drunkenly. Their dead shed leaves rise up.
Overcast and damp, with woodpecker rattle and squirrel-claw clatter and an exuberant robin duetting with his echo.
Dawn. A phoebe and a cardinal are singing in the rain. At the woods’ edge, the last patch of snow has shrunk to the size of a hubcap.
The last patch of snow is sinking into the earth. A titmouse flits from branch to branch up a walnut sapling, whistling softly to himself.
Sunrise. I watch the trees grow shadows and pelts of sunlight. Anyone rooted can become a gnomon: from the Greek, an expert or interpreter.
A few degrees above freezing on a day forecast to be warm, and the air is already busy with flying things: insects, milkweed down, a phoebe.
Equinox. A cowbird’s liquid note. My breath glows in the sunlight as if from the lungs of some gold buddha.
A ray of sun strikes the lilac, setting its yellow buds aglow. The sound of water gurgling under my yard. The back-and-forth of nuthatches.
A dark morning; the ridges disappear into fog. A Carolina wren’s call is barely audible over the rain’s deafening hush.
Another gray day. The only snow left is what the plow mounded up, the earliest dating back to before Christmas: literal snows of yesteryear.
Under low, heavy clouds, the air is still. I listen for the patter of raindrops but all I hear is a nuthatch, some crows, a raven’s croak.
Can daylight be saved? An hour late, I watch the sun assemble itself among the ridgetop trees one blazing shard at a time—a kind of kintsugi.