5:58 am. The crescent moon is increasingly alone in the sky as the dawn light metastasizes. A distant whippoorwill.
Year: 2021
And just like that, it’s autumn: clear and cool, the meadows yellow with goldenrod. A hummingbird visits the Mexican sunflower. How long till she’s off to Mexico herself?
Rain thickens toward mid-morning as the ex-hurricane moves through. One cricket still calls from the shelter of peony leaves.
Humid, overcast and cool. I study the flamboyant gestures of certain meadow plants already more than half-way dead. A fat beetle flies past.
Almost fall. The motherless fawn running out of the woods has lost its spots but not its cloud of flies.
The fog slowly lifts, except where it’s been trapped by funnel spider webs. The cardinal’s cheer seems a bit misplaced.
Fog. A quiet gurgle from the stream, still digesting last night’s downpour. The only other song belongs to a vireo.
Ten minutes till sunrise. The gibbous moon is losing its glow like a guitar pick thrown from a stage.
In the dawn light, a hummingbird double-checks that I’m not a flower, hovering over my head like a wild thought.
A stratum of sunlit leaves forming in the forest understory. A cicada wakes up. Under the house, something coughs.
The meadow and its crickets. The full moon emerges from the clouds upside-down in every drop of dew.
A few minutes after moonset, and the ground fog is still aglow. A screech owl’s monotone trill.
Sun in the trees and a small spot of orange beside the porch: a Mexican sunflower blooming despite having twice been dinner for a groundhog.
Cardinal joined by a whippoorwill. The white shapes in the yard turn out to be snakeroot.