Sunrise past, the sky goes gray. The damp woods smell of earth and leaf-mold. The old lilac bristles with bright green buds.
March 2024
3/30/2024
Red sunrise. To the south, the moon has gone flat on one side so it resembles a giant ear for the first crow to yell into when it created the world. The chanting phoebe clearly has no inkling.
3/29/2024
A goldfinch foraging alone in the crown of a birch continues to warble, intonation rising and falling as if still in conversation with the flock. The sun muscles up through the ridgetop trees.
3/28/2024
A band of salmon-colored cloud above the horizon half an hour past sunrise. From the top branch of a walnut tree, a brown-headed cowbird sings his single, complex note.
3/27/2024
The briefest opening in the clouds for sunrise. The first brown thrasher drops by to sing a few bars. Then the squeaky wheels of goldfinches, converging on my mother’s feeders.
3/26/2024
Red spreading from the clouds to the western ridge. Robin, cardinal, phoebe: the early-spring trio, joined by a downy woodpecker on percussion with a high-pitched dead limb.
3/25/2024
Another clear, cold morning. Two mourning doves call back and forth, occasionally overlapping, as the sunlight inches down toward their perches.
3/24/2024
Clear and cold as the moon’s searchlight sinks through ridgetop trees. Dawn stains the east. The cardinal wakes up, full of cheer.
3/23/2024
Rain and fog. The birds call one at a time, as if auditioning. A sodden squirrel, grayer than gray, trots across the gray gravel road.
3/22/2024
Cold and still. The rising sun shines straight down the old woods road to illuminate the whitewashed springhouse, just three days past the equinox.
3/21/2024
Unseasonably cold, with the sun so bright and air so clear, the few clouds seem lost, like guests at the wrong party. Leathery old mountain laurel leaves look fresh and new.
3/20/2024
Heavily overcast at mid-morning. I watch a squirrel surveying the yard from atop a stump, then loping over and retrieving a husked walnut from a tuft of grass.
3/19/2024
Four hours before the equinox, the ground is white, with more snow swirling down. The miniature daffodils dangle from their stalks like deflated balloons.
3/18/2024
Blue above the cloud bank blocking the sunrise. At the woods’ edge, white-breasted nuthatches are having a free and frank exchange of views.