Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Dave Bonta 
Cool and still, with a white sky and feeble sun. The jewelweed in the dripline of the porch has grown tall enough that I can see as well as hear the occasional hummingbird visitor, sipping nectar from bright orange goblets. At the other end of the yard, all the lilac leaves are turning brown.
Clear, cool, and breezy—a week to the day after our last dry high. Six crows sit on dead branches atop the two tallest locust trees in the yard. One minute past sunrise, they look all around, shift on their perches, and take flight.
An hour after sunrise the sky darkens again. At the first close rumble of thunder, a fawn leaps up out of the meadow and dashes into the woods.
Cool and humid at dawn. I open my laptop to draw the mosquitoes away from my head with a glowing screen. The cardinal begins to sing.
Sunny and cool. I happen to spot a moment of tenderness between hummingbirds: he buzzing back and forth a few inches from her perch in the eastern red cedar, she tilting her head back for a lightning-fast meeting of tongues.
Overcast and cool. The aspen sapling in my yard is wound around with bindweed, I notice, and I spend a few minutes removing it—unwinding, as it were. The leaves tremble as only an aspen can do.
Another clear, autumnal morning, with the temperature around 12C. The grinder at the quarry is having its breakfast of limestone. I marvel at the flies coming to life as the sun strikes.
Clear and cold at sunrise. The dawn chorus is down to field sparrow, common yellowthroat and goldfinches. Distant crows. A truck jake-breaking through the gap. A red-eyed vireo starts up.
Overcast and cool. A rain shower comes rustling through the grass as a pileated woodpecker drums up on the ridge. I crush a mosquito, but not before she has bequeathed to me her itch.
Overcast and cool. Here and there, black walnut leaves are beginning to yellow. A deer foraging at the woods’ edge breaks into a trot to try to escape her flies.
Cool and clear, with sound out of the east: the beeping of quarry trucks and a loud scraping of metal on rock as the sun makes its way through the canopy, prompting a burst of song from a common yellowthroat.
Cool and clearing after yesterday’s storms. A red-bellied woodpecker calls from a dead limb at the top of the tallest black locust, making it sway. Below him on another dead branch, a fledgling is being fed by its mother.
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.
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.