The first blooming tall goldenrod glows yellow at the woods’ edge. In a cherry tree, a fall webworm tent enshrouds a garland of dead leaves.
Dave Bonta
A half-grown fawn, no mother in sight, wanders through the foxtail millet and into the woods, its fading spots glimmering in the deep shade.
The sun climbs through the big red maple. A young Carolina wren sits on the springhouse gable, still and quiet, just swiveling its head.
Sunlight struggles through the haze. The large black-and-blue butterfly known as a red-spotted purple keeps returning to my red porch floor.
Just after daylight, the sound of a shower approaching and petering out before it reaches the porch. Two chickadees flit through the bushes.
Cool but humid. A vireo sings quietly, as if talking to himself. One of those quick, small flies cleans its wings with its hind-most legs.
Green blur: a hummingbird. Two or three pileated woodpeckers cackle back and forth. The meter reader’s truck, its flashing yellow light.
Again it takes a finger of sun to draw my attention to something in plain sight: the foxtail millet heads—tails?—bent low by their seeds.
A field cricket chirps and falls silent, but the tree crickets never stop trilling. A small, purple tuft lit up by the sun: Canada thistle.
A katydid that had been perched on my chair leg walks jerkily across the porch and stops in the shadow of a railing, outlandishly green.
A wood thrush fledgling lands on the lower bar of the fretwork spandrel, breast feathers disheveled, eyerings imparting a look of surprise.
Tiny ants are digging holes in the tansy flowers—yellow eyes with seething black pupils. A single-propeller plane: the sound of a clear day.
Sitting outside with my laptop, blind to the world. A phoebe flies past two feet from my nose, followed a minute later by a hummingbird.
A phoebe dives at a cabbage white butterfly and comes up short. It zigzags after it, hovers, snaps again: only a tiny piece of white wing.