A dozen vultures fresh from their communal roost circle low overhead, wings shining white whenever they tilt toward the sun—angels of death.
Dave Bonta
1:15 a.m. Thinking there’s something chewing on the leaves outside my window, I get the flashlight and discover rain. Time for bed.
Three butterfly milkweed pods have split open, and dangle clouds of down. From the neighbors’, the howl and mutter of a weed whacker.
From just inside the woods, a bird call I don’t recognize—an anxious couple of notes. The purple asters slowly unclench to an overcast sky.
The first small holes through to the ridge-top sky have appeared in the green wall opposite my porch. The sound of falling acorns.
We don’t hear much from the highway these days. What I hear: Canada geese off to the north, a train whistle, two kinds of crickets.
As the sun climbs through the trees, small patches of sunlight appear and disappear in the springhouse meadow, setting the goldenrod aglow.
A squirrel creeps up to the flicker hole in the dead elm, but another squirrel pops out chittering and gives chase through the treetops.
As sunlight reaches the forest floor, the chipmunks emerge and begin to chip, their metronomes mingling—a dry waterfall of sound.
A downy woodpecker lands in the dead cherry tree. She trills and the rotten limbs tremble, taps and they make hardly a sound.
Scattered drips of dew from the top roof. A doe and fawn ghost by along the woods’ edge, the fawn’s spots as faded as snakeroot flowers.
The hairs on my arm tower over the scarlet mite wandering among them. The air shimmers with what the Chinese call maomaoyu—fine hair rain.
Fog from the valley spills over the ridgetop and advances on the porch. The jays start calling, unable to see each other in adjacent trees.
When I come out, a committee of flies is convening on my chair, despite the chill. Ten minutes pass without a single bird call, then phoebe.