Breezy and cool, with the smell of smoke a bit diminished. The patter of rain. Three yellow walnut leaves flutter to the ground together. A rumble of thunder.
Dave Bonta
Unseasonably cool with the pall of wildfire smoke over the region. It is as thick as a thin mist and burns my throat. But even though their sun is a lurid red, the goldfinches and a common yellowthroat keep singing.
The sky is white, though the weather app insists it’s clear: thick haze from wildfires far to the north, I think. Goldfinches dominate the morning soundtrack, beginning to nest just as many of the migrants are wrapping it up.
Heat mediated by a breeze. A hummingbird clearwing moth visits the garden, sipping nectar from bergamot tubes with a straw-like tongue swifter than thought. I read up on the species: its migratory habits, its lack of any hearing, its taste for purple.
Sun in the treetops as the tanager revisits his hit song, no longer in heavy rotation. A firefly sails past with his light off.
Clear and cool—the first morning of a dry high. A hummingbird visits the orange jewelweed below the porch. A pungent, camphor-like odor makes me think of blossoming yarrow, but I finally decide instead it’s coming from the black locust limbs smashed down in a storm more than a week ago.
Breezy and cool, with enough high-altitude murk to keep the sun at half strength. A firefly circles the arm of my chair. Two more bindweed blossoms have opened above yesterday’s, which hangs limp as an empty balloon.
A white bindweed flower has opened in the yard—morning glory enough for a sky more white than blue. Wild garlic heads have almost all straightened up and begun to split open.
After a downpour at dawn, the sky brightens, then darkens again. The aspen and tulip tree saplings in my yard take turns trembling in the breeze. The tanager sings.
A sun shower an hour after sunrise. Hummingbirds battle over the mop-headed bergamot. I scuttle back indoors to get things done before a scheduled power outage.
Overcast and cool. A hen turkey foraging at the woods’ edge suddenly vaults into the air with a great flapping and clucking and lands on a low walnut limb, a red fox like an apparition melting back into the shadows.
Rain subsiding into mizzle by mid-morning. The distant thunder of a pileated woodpecker. A scarlet tanager sings quietly from the small trees below my mother’s sitting room.
Low clouds merging into fog. In the front garden, several dozen bergamots are in bloom, rain dripping from their purple locks. A very sodden chipmunk runs past my feet.
Foggy and cool. I sit enjoying the deep stillness, gazing at the wreckage from last night’s storm—two black birches smashed down by the top half of a black locust—and anticipating the chainsaw’s roar.