Overcast and cold. The porch and yard are aglow with cherry blossoms, blown down by yesterday’s storms. A catbird mews from the springhouse.
Dave Bonta
Cherry blossoms are falling—an early-morning bumblebee. Dressed for a funeral, I sit listening to the first wood thrushes of the year.
Black cherries leaf out before flowering, but this morning I notice three white spots in the one across the road: budding caterpillar tents.
I dreamed of a late snow and woke to find the earliest miniature yellow daffodils shriveled, and a new clump of white ones in full bloom.
A male starling—a rarity here—lands among the cherry blossoms, iridescent black feathers speckled with white. He gargles musically.
In the half-light, the faint crackling sound of a deer eating a rose bush. A lone Canada goose flies over, honking enough for a whole flock.
Shrill chirps of a truck going in reverse. Under a lowering sky, daylight seeps from the jagged blaze of forsythia at the edge of the woods.
Now that I know there are bears about, every snapping twig gets my attention. The cherry tree’s pink with swollen buds. A rumble of thunder.
Over the dawn fusillade of woodpeckers, I hear the distant gobbles of a turkey. Five deer graze below the house. The doves make moan.
Still cloudless, but the light lacks the crystal-clarity of previous mornings. Juncos all a-twitter, perhaps feeling the pull of the north.
Fresh from their beds, two deer come out of the woods and stand blinking at the new green grass. One scratches her belly with a hind foot.
Cool morning of a day forecast to be warm. The sun turns daffodils, red maple blossoms, and the silver fur of the willow into stained glass.
Clear and quiet. Off in the woods, the jagged pine snag gleams yellowish-white, as if in imitation of the lightning bolt that killed it.
Clear, and four degrees below freezing. I watch the sunlight descend a tall tulip poplar and try to block out the sound of morning traffic.