Coffee mug in one hand, I’m weeding stiltgrass from the herb bed. Such a delicate invader, so easy to kill! And yet so tough to eradicate.
Dave Bonta
The air is close, but it gets even closer: first a shower, then a torrent. The wood thrush falls silent. The doe flicks water from her ears.
Already by 8:00, the noontime heat is heralded by the aimless dance of a cabbage white butterfly, the dry rattle of a grasshopper’s wings.
A rare alarm call from one of the reclusive Cooper’s hawks nesting up in the woods. Sometimes I feel like a trespasser in my own front yard.
Sun on the windows—my hand casts two shadows on the page. The monotonous call of a titmouse gets a faint, equally monotonous reply.
Steady rain. A phoebe snatches insects from the undersides of birch leaves, and in the distant drone of an airplane I hear news of the sun.
I watch the sunbeams’ slow drift of mites and motes, entranced, until a shadow cackles: pileated woodpecker resplendent in his tribal crest.
Cardinal song on a cool morning—those January notes. Up in the woods, a patch of sun on rain-slick huckleberry leaves shines white as snow.
A bald-faced hornet lands on a dead cherry limb, chews and fills her mandibles with wood. Somewhere another tree is growing a paper fruit.
Overcast and damp. A heron flies over, and my gaze slides from its slow, calm wingbeats to the ceaseless agitation of the quaking aspens.
A doe strains to lick the flies…
A doe strains to lick the flies from the part of her back her tail can’t sweep, black riders unshaken by the endless tremors in her fur.
A chipping sparrow’s rattle, regular as surf. In the middle of the yard a multiflora rosebush ravaged by deer proffers its one white branch.
A small ichneumon wasp alights on a porch post, tapping and listening for signs of life. Up in the woods, a deer’s explosive snort.
The tulip tree’s enormous flowers are opening, yellow and orange petals dripping nectar, accompanied by the wood thrush’s choir of one.