Up on the ridgetop to watch the sunrise, seven distinct layers of red in the smog over State College, itself hidden by another wooded ridge. A jay wakes up and screams like a Hollywood eagle.
Year: 2024
Another large oak has de-leafed, leaving more room for the overcast sky and its patchwork of light and dark. A screech owl trills one last time before full day.
The sun rises an hour earlier, heralded by the usual motley assortment of sparrows, wrens and corvids. The stratosphere breaks out into a rash of clouds.
A screech owl trilling just before sunrise sets the small birds off. The forsythia at the woods’ edge is once again yellow. The clouds turn red.
After rain in the small hours, a clearing wind at dawn. Winter wren song issues from a hole in the road bank—a quiet torrent.
A cloud that started life as a contrail turns livid as a cut then slowly fades to white before dissolving. A white-throated sparrow repeatedly sings a single, interrogatory note.
Dawn. High in a red oak crown an acorn lets go, tapping the branches on its way down like a blind man’s cane.
With no inversion layer, the early-morning traffic noise keeps its distance, like the worn-down moon cradling its heart of darkness. My rumbling stomach is the loudest thing.
Red dawn spreading like a wine spill from a small patch of burgundy near the moon, which I watch with head held still to see it inch from twig to twig. A white-throated sparrow is the first to sing.
Sunday silence. The moon tangled in the treetops glimmers under a heavy eyelid. A train plays rooster for the dawn.
Clouds with yellow bellies and a clearing breeze. One oak leaf spirals down stem-first, hits the ground and bounces.
Clear and still, with frost in the yard lingering well into mid-morning. A lone crow with the sun on its wings disappears off to the east.
Clear at dawn. A pileated woodpecker rockets silently through the thinning forest canopy, and lands on the side of an oak like the angel of death for carpenter ants, elegant black-and-white wings folding shut.
Before dawn, a moon with toothmarks. The tick tock of an acorn dropped by a flying squirrel.