They’re shapeshifting daily now, the faces in the thinning treetops silhouetted against the dawn sky. I push my glasses down to unblur the moon.
Year: 2021
The rain stops but the trees go on dripping. The sky brightens. Through newly bare spicebush branches, I can see the springhouse once again.
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!
On a dark morning, fall colors that seemed bland yesterday are bright embers. Behind the still-green lilac, a deer’s pale legs.
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.
The slender reed of a white-throated sparrow’s voice trembles in the wind. A hole opens in the clouds, blue and sunrise pink.
Breezy drizzle mixing in with falling leaves—those that twirl, those that spiral, those that somersault, those that glide.
Gibbous moon overhead through a thin veil of fog. A breeze moves through the forest, liberating the night’s rain.
Four small patches of blue sky huddle together like blue sheep in a white woolen sky. The wingbeats of crows.
A dark and rainy dawn. One especially well-harmonized train horn and the sparrows and wrens wake up.
Gloomy with a few drops of rain. I spot a new-to-me Virginia creeper six feet from the porch: that crimson.
The last clear morning for a while. A red-tailed hawk flies through the bare birches, trailed by two outraged crows.
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.
With the understory losing its leaves, the forest is threadbare, shot through with light. In the herb bed, a volunteer tomato is in bloom.