Mounds of white snakeroot in the yard glow dimly in the light of a half moon. Orion gets one leg over the ridge before he starts to fade, and the soft calls of migrant thrushes fill the trees.
Dave Bonta
Under a cacophony of jays, a doe and two fawns with their spots all gone graze just inside the edge of the woods. One does a sudden dance, spinning around to elude a fly.
Sun in the treetops, joined by jays in noisy, acorn-gathering joy. A pewee bends a note. The distant grind of the quarry.
Clear and still, with dew dripping off the roof and a pair of phoebes yelling “Phoebe!” at each other. Twenty-four years ago, the sky was just this clear.
Canada geese, a screech owl, some crows, and the inevitable wren sing in the sunrise, the western ridge turning red under a flat-tire moon.
Another cold sunrise. A distant Carolina wren song prompts the wren roosting atop my heating oil tank to come flying out singing and land in the bracken.
Cold, clear, and still at sunrise, with little sign of the more than two million birds who streamed overhead during the moonlit hours aside from a few soft, scattered chirps.
Partly cloudy and cool at sunrise, with more yellow and orange leaves than I’ve ever seen this early in the fall: not just walnut and black gum but black birch, tulip poplar, and even a few maples, just as our 30 acres of goldenrod approach their peak of bloom. I’m reminded of the Chinese name for San Francisco: old gold mountain.
A shimmer of rain, which the roof gathers into a smattering of drips. A pileated woodpecker flies over, yelling its head off. A pair of catbirds exchange notes.
Inside a white whale of fog, the trees drip and drop yellow leaves, and the sun is felt more than seen, with a faint wash of blue beyond.
Sun through a scrim of cirrus. The hillside ticks with chipmunks. Two white-breasted nuthatches call back and forth at the woods’ edge.
Snakeroot flower heads are beginning to open, white as the cows’ milk that they’re said to poison. A sunbeam reaching the porch shows me the shape of my breath.
Sun floods the treetops. I sneeze so loudly it sets off the neighbor’s dog, a quarter-mile away. The scrabble of claws from a high-speed red squirrel chase.
Chickadee scold-calls join an agitated red squirrel above the springhouse. Nothing stirs in the deep weeds. The sun burrows into a cloud.