Clear and cold, with an inversion layer bringing quarry and highway sounds out of the east. A female Carolina wren ticks quietly from the thick shrubbery around the springhouse. Cold as I am, I luxuriate in the absense of mosquitoes.
September 24,
Rain in widely scattered drops, a light seasoning over everything. It intensifies; a half-molted walnut tree begins leafleting the yard. It tapers off. A squirrel chisels open a nut.
Rainy and cold. The tall goldenrod heads are bowed, flowering downward. A squirrel’s keening alarm for a hawk.
Cold wind and rain, belied by all the cheerful yellow starting to move from the goldenrod up into the trees at the woods’ edge.
A couple of cold nights and the yellow has spread like a contagion through the birches. A squirrel hangs down among the green walnuts.
Clear and cold. I see that the stiltgrass stems have all turned color in the yard—a chaos of feathery green threaded through with red.
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
The flat white sky prompts me to notice that the white snakeroot—a plant that clouds up the meadow, being toxic to deer—has gone to seed.
Clear and cool. A bee-fly hovers over the lip of my cup. Right next to where I sat stargazing last night, a fresh twist of coyote scat.
Breezy and cool. Three phoebes hawk for insects along the woods’ edge while a young pine or blackpoll warbler flits through the goldenrod.
Another cloudless morning. Chipmunks chase each other through a bar of sunlight on the forest floor. The distant, metallic calls of a raven.
As it warms up, the noise from the valley fades. Seven blue jays land in the tall locusts, looking anything but blue against the clear sky.
Sunny and cold. A phoebe calling up by the barn, as if this were some morning in March—and he was just arriving, not preparing to leave.
I’m looking at a walnut when it lets go and thuds to the ground—the branch rocks like a diving board. A vireo calls softly from the woods.