First day of a dry high. Sunlight seeping down the trees. By the time it reaches the forest floor, the cicadas have started up.
Year: 2022
Clouds gravid with rain at sunrise. A wood thrush calls quietly. In the top of the tallest oak, a squirrel’s silhouette begins its descent.
Overcast with a shimmer of light rain. A red-eyed vireo still calls at the woods’ edge. The thud of a black walnut onto a roof.
Sun through a scrim of cloud. The first white snakeroot is in bloom. A Linne’s cicada rattles like a bad engine.
Half an hour after sunrise, a lawnmower motor in the sky: the curved sail of an ultralight glowing in the sun, heading south.
Crystal-clear, with leaves still wet from rain: I carry a chair up into the woods, luxuriate in the shimmering green and gold.
The sun finally struggles out by midmorning. Rain-dampened vegetation glistens like a salamander’s skin.
Drizzle thickening now and then into proper rain. The bracken in my yard glows in all the colors of decline and fall.
The third autumnal morning in a row, with clouds introducing a more melancholy note: nesting time is over, the sky road calls…
45F/7C at sunrise. I carry a chair up into the woods, watch sunlight seep down the oaks with color commentary by a red-eyed vireo.
Clear, cold, and quiet except for the wren. A breeze through the treetops: trembling leaves anointed by the sun.
Clear and cool as an October morning. Treetop oak leaves turn orange in the sunrise. All the crows wake up.
Milk-white sky and the white noise of tree crickets. A pileated woodpecker cackles to herself at the top of a tall locust.
Clear but with atmospheric haze, so the sunlight leaking down the trees looks murky behind the goldfinches’ purer yellow.