Two white-tailed deer leap through the dried goldenrod and asters beyond the springhouse, surfacing, diving—dolphins in a brown sea.
Dave Bonta
At first light, a siren goes off and doesn’t stop, a high steady note as if from a Tibetan prayer bowl. Please God, I mutter, make it stop.
The urgent grunts of a buck in rut chasing two does through the laurel, their movements easy to follow now that the trees are nearly bare.
Cold and overcast. Four silent bluebirds drop into the spicebush in my herb garden and begin gobbling the blood-red drupes, stones and all.
A hard rain overnight has reduced the forest canopy to tatters. Where cherry leaves had hung, nothing but beads of water reflecting the sky.
The wind is out of the east, bringing routine news of violence to the pitted earth. A bare birch at the woods’ edge fills up with finches.
Rounding the corner of the house, I spot a reflection in my living room window and stop short: leaves of all colors. The change is upon us.
The cherry tree beside my porch is at its fragile peak of color, bright orange leaves fluttering loose from a clusterfuck of diseased limbs.
Two squirrels meet nose-to-nose on a maple trunk and grapple gently, gray against the gray bark. They freeze for a second and almost vanish.
Mid-morning, and a weak sun sets the oaks aglow—orange, burgundy. Two archery hunters rustle past, incongruous in their green camouflage.
6:20 a.m. All through the newly bare branches of the black walnut tree beside the driveway, the stars glitter, too high for any squirrel.
Another thin fur of snow on the ground. The four aspens in the corner of the field shiver as the sunlight floods their yellow crowns.