Waiting for the sun as the western ridge turns from pink to orange to yellow. The plastic flamingo in my garden is furred with frost.
2023
November 17, 2023
A few degrees above freezing. In the half dark I can just make out a spider descending from the rafters into my lap. Where is she off to, I wonder, so late in the year?
November 16, 2023
Venus like a searchlight through the bare trees. A great-horned owl calls on the far side of the ridge, but gets no response. He tries again. Silence.
November 15, 2023
Cold and still at sunrise. The western ridge turns from barn-red to gold, like an autumn in reverse.
November 14, 2023
Sunrise hidden by a layer of cloud. A white-footed mouse explores the corrugated roof over my oil tanks, its likely sickness shown by its lack of fear.
November 13, 2023
22F/-5C at sunrise. Every twig and leaf is lightly frosted. I watch my clouds of breath drift into the yard.
November 12, 2023
Sun through thin, high clouds—enough to make the last few scarlet oak crowns glow. An ambulance wails through the gap.
November 11, 2023
A few patches of frost in the yard as the sun clears the ridgetop. Juncos move through the rambling old lilac, its last few leaves faded nearly to yellow.
November 10, 2023
Overcast and quiet an hour before sunrise. Hunters’ headlamps move back and forth on the dark hillside like lost stars.
November 9, 2023
it starts raining just as I come out on the porch, completing the November trinity: cold, gray, and wet. Goldfinch chatter. The keening of truck tires on the interstate.
November 8, 2023
The sun clears the ridge and I’m blinded—the oaks are mostly bare now. Those that aren’t, glow red like a scattering of old barns.
November 7, 2023
Breezy and warm. With each gust of wind, a flotilla of leaves sets sail from the big tulip tree, as the sun ascends a ladder of clouds.
November 6, 2023
Sunrise glowing orange between the half-naked ridgetop oaks. The yard fills with small birds: sparrows, kinglets, the inevitable wren.
November 5, 2023
Overcast sunrise for the return to standard time. The restless footsteps of a buck below the house, carrying his rack of bare branches into the woods.