The sun rose while I was watching the moon. Now there’s a black-throated blue warbler at the woods’ edge whispering its three-syllable song.
Month: April 2024
Night and day overlap as the moon rises through the trees, serenaded by a family of barred owls, while the first song sparrow and cardinal herald the dawn. Then the whip-poor-will begins to shriek.
Fog at dawn, raucous with the calls of a whip-poor-will staking his claim to the woods’ edge, close enough that I can hear him clear his throat.
Under a white sky, the rambling old white lilac is beginning to bloom. Half an hour past sunrise, the first, tentative raindrops on the roof.
Out before dawn, I find moonlight in my chair. A song sparrow sings one phrase, possibly without waking up. A quiet trickle from the spring.
Overcast and cold, with a red-bellied woodpecker’s ceaseless whinnying. The old crabapple tree is red and ready to open for sunshine and bees.
Waiting for the rising sun to emerge from the clouds, I read half a book. The sky is a crazy quilt, orange and gray and pale blue. The birds are re-visiting all their classic hits.
The sun climbs from clarity into murk. Feeling insufficiently caffeinated, I watch the tulip tree’s tall, green torch fade to chartreuse.
Five degrees below freezing and still. A red-winged blackbird calls from a sunlit treetop above the springhouse and its tiny cattail marsh.
It’s overcast and near freezing, but as soon as I step onto the porch, the worries that kept me awake half the night vanish. The woods’ edge is a gallery of swollen buds, blossoms, catkins and tiny leaves. Turkey gobbles blend with a train’s mournful horn.
Cool with a clearing sky at sunrise. A blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy. The smell of damp earth.
A heavy white sky giving few hints of sunrise. In the distance, the faint bells of a wood thrush. A field sparrow’s accelerating rush toward silence.
Just past sunrise, a vagrant red squirrel appears in the yard, given away at first by her nervous, jerky movements as she forages for breakfast, then the old-barn color as she emerges from the lilac’s shadow, head swiveling about.
The bridal wreath bush that persists in the shadow of the old lilac is in bloom—the only time of year I remember its existence. From just above it come the buzzy notes of a black-throated green warbler. The sky turns white.