A meadow vole takes an after-death journey into the forest in the jaws of a cat, who holds her head high for once and does not slink.
Dave Bonta
A morning so clear, the half moon looks close enough to touch. A squirrel still spooked by some long-gone predator has yelled itself hoarse.
The guys arrive promptly at 8:00 o’clock to put a new roof on the porch. We stand around talking for 20 minutes about lead-core bullets.
Coldest morning of the month so far. I notice that each limb of the dead cherry is growing a shaggy coat of turkey-tail fungus.
Watching night turn to day—a thing that should be gradual, but instead proceeds by small leaps of realization: “It’s lighter now!” Rain.
Many of the asters that shut their purple lashes for the night have yet to open, frustrating a honeybee. A squat native bee pushes right in.
As so often in fall, a clear morning sky means not clarity but inversion—the bellowing of trucks. A yellow leaf lands with a soft click.
No matter how late I rise, the light still has that early-morning look—as today at 9:00, pooling golden at the entrance to the woods.
How to describe a monarch butterfly’s flight? Too straight for “flutter,” too erratic for “soar.” And this one—why is it heading north?
Days of rain, and the stream is only a gurgle. Even as the sky clears, in the woods the rain is still making its slow way to the ground.
A mottle-winged moth flops like a fish across the floor. A mosquito tries to drill through denim, her hind-most legs like levers going up.
Gauzy curtains of rain blow back and forth. A yellowish warbler darts through the lilac, harrying the dull-colored residents.
A hummingbird hovers over the red porch floor made glossy by wind-blown rain. A catbird on a dead limb tilts its head to eye the clouds.
The sound of rain as it thins to a whisper or thickens into heavy traffic: on the roof, on grass, on tree leaves toughened by a long summer.