A brief lull in the rain at dawn, darkness full of the sound of rushing water and the dim shapes of the first daffodils, face-down in the dead grass.
2023
March 24, 2023
Gray and still. Springs gurgle their liturgies. Looking nervously all about, a squirrel disinters a walnut and races into the woods with it.
March 23, 2023
Fog and scattered showers. The last few woodcock peents overlap with phoebes—two of them already, trying to out-sing each other.
March 22, 2023
Cold and gray. Up in the corner of the field, a tom turkey raises and lowers the dark banner of his tail, gobbling at his own magnificence.
March 21, 2023
A cloud-free morning, the sun through the trees just bright enough to fool my body into feeling warm. A mourning dove’s song sounds reassuring: There. There. There.
March 20, 2023
Clear and cold. All the while the sunrise seeps down from the treetops, a squirrel files away at a rock-hard black walnut shell to extract meat seasoned by months underground.
March 19, 2023
A dozen dead leaves circle the yard as the clouds’ bellies turn orange. A phoebe calls once, sotto voce, from a branch above the creek.
March 18, 2023
The sun guttering below a lid of utility-gray cloud illuminates a small flotilla of snowflakes. It’s quiet apart from one, highly excited wren.
March 17, 2023
In the half-light of dawn, something approaches, rustling in the dry leaves: rain. A few minutes later, the first phoebe begins his time-worn chant.
March 16, 2023
Sunrise into slow-moving cirrus; the light dulls like the eyes of a dying fish. In the windless calm, the long gargle of an 18-wheeler descending an exit.
March 15, 2023
Clear and cold, with a bitter wind to remind me it’s actually March. I watch the sun through the corner of my eye as it climbs through the ridgetop trees.
March 14, 2023
The porch is plastered with fresh snow; more flakes fly past without stopping. A Carolina wren holds forth from the heart of a barberry.
March 13, 2023
A fresh inch of wet snow, clinging to every twig—the forest refoliated in white. But already the roof has begun to drip.
March 12, 2023
Back with the old bank, Daylight Savings and Loan. A fuzzy gibbous moon. Something stirring in the juniper and going back to sleep.