Clear, cool, and dry at last. Shadows have sharp outlines; patches of sun in the woods or meadow glow like places apart. A small breeze inhabits the top of the tulip tree, paging through its leaves.
Dave Bonta
Overcast, humid and cool. A bang from the back roof—an aborted walnut. The sun comes out for a few seconds. One of the last 17-year cicadas falls silent again.
Overcast and cool. In the daylily patch at the base of the walnut tree next to the road, there’s a changing of the guard as yesterday’s trumpets go limp and today’s ease open, orange and buzzing.
Partly cloudy, humid and still. A hen turkey clucks once from the woods’ edge. I slap myself awake, killing mosquitoes.
Overcast and buggy, with the noise of a long-delayed tractor repair underway at the neighbor’s, and a blue jay transitioning from anxiety to alarm.
Rain tapering off by eight. Even the fog looks green. Wild garlic plants in the yard are beginning to straighten, heads going up like herons trying to swallow large fish.
Thin fog, or just very thick humidity? But it’s still cool enough to enjoy the slanting sunbeams, the tired-sounding cicadas, the catbird’s jazz.
Out before sunrise to catch the coolness, I rub a jewelweed poulice against a small poison ivy rash on my middle finger, feeling the itch subside and contemplating the yard, where poison ivy and jewelweed freely intermingle.
Day three of the heat wave. The cicadas have been calling since before dawn. Two goldfinches yellower than the sun come chittering out of the treetops and swoop past the porch.
Clear at sunrise with an eyelash moon and a deer grazing just inside the woods’ edge. A Cooper’s hawk calls from atop the tallest black locust and flies off to the east.
Breezy and clear. A cicada lands on the chair beside me and emits a brief, mechanical purr, red eyes glowing like the lights on an ambulance, before flying directly into a railing, dropping to the floor and relaunching into the yard.
Overcast and cool. Buzzing and squeaking, a ruby-throated hummingbird circles a red bandanna hung out to dry.
Breezy and cool—a front at last. A train keens in the distance. The whispery discourse of trees in which cicadas have lapsed for a few long moments into silence.
Sun and a breeze have come to dry us out; everything shines and drips. A cerulean warbler and a field sparrow sing back and forth across the woods’ edge.