Sun in the top of the tall tulip poplar—yellow crowning yellow. The last nighttime cricket falls silent. Off through the thinning woods, new chinks of sky.
Month: September 2024
Quiet and cool. A hummingbird hovers over the bright pink cover of my book: Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon.
Distant shots from a semi-automatic: poppoppoppoppoppop. The flutter of a falling leaf. A squirrel’s footsteps on the roof.
6:24. The cardinal sings a few times and falls silent. 6:26. The whippoorwill calls a few times and falls silent. 6:29. The Carolina wren starts up.
Cool and still with murky sunlight and yellow leaves dropping one by one. From the north and east, the guttural hum of industry—that drone note.
Another gorgeous, cool morning. Two ravens fly over at sunrise, croaking. A phoebe in the distance is just audible under the usual cascade of wren song.
Clear and still. A chipmunk chips from her hole in the rock wall beside the porch, getting a much more resonant sound than her rival up in the woods.
A cold and cloudy dawn. The thump and clatter of hooves, deer crashing through the underbrush—hounded not by a predator but the first stirrings of rut. A migrant thrush’s soft call.
Breezy and cool at mid-morning. A blue jay’s rusty croon in the crown of an oak. The plop of dropped acorns.
A soft, steady rain at dawn. At sunrise, a hummingbird buzzes in to sip from the jewelweeds under the porch roof dripline.
Another cool, clear, still morning. The bang of a walnut on a metal roof. A chipmunk’s metronome.
A dawn too cold for crickets, and still except where a squirrel makes a branch tremble. From the top of a black locust, a hairy woodpecker’s nasal chirps.
Another cold morning. The sun through thin cirrus casts a wan light over the clouds of blossoming snakeroot.
The coldest morning since May, with an inversion layer bringing sound from the east—the slightly quieter direction. The Carolina wren duets with beeping quarry trucks.