Fog lifts to reveal blue sky, the sun in the treetops. A scarlet tanager hurtles past the porch with a second in close pursuit. The morning’s first itch prickles the back of my hand.
Dave Bonta
Overcast and cool. A pair of love-struck squirrels appear to have designs on my house, climbing the red cedar, peering in the windows.
Rain and fog shut out all sounds from the valley; a gobbling turkey and a pair of pileated woodpeckers are the loudest things. A titmouse sheltering in the lilac shakes the rain from his wings.
Overcast and cool. Water gurgles into the ground and gurgles out again, and half-way between, a meadow vole surfaces from the thatch, her dark fur a study in ceaseless motion.
Having risen late on the one sunny morning of the week, I watch a tiny, pale green grasshopper wander my trouser leg, its antennae sweeping the dark denim ahead.
Gloomy and damp, with a shimmer of mizzle. The distant boom of dynamite at the quarry. A catbird improvises a few melodic lines. A breeze springs up.
A break in the clouds allows a bit of sunrise to stain the treetops, where a noisy kestrel gets dive-bombed by a robin. A pair of black cherry trees are in bloom—white snouts pointing in all directions.
After so many gray days, the clarity of the air and the quality of light moving through new leaves feel miraculous. A red-eyed vireo’s lyrical harangue.
Heavily overcast and cold. A redstart is calling from above the springhouse—a buoyant buzz—while a distant wood thrush makes me revisit my dreams.
An hour past sunrise, an opossum is out hunting earthworms pushed out of their burrows by the all-night rain. She keeps pausing to raise her snout and sniff the air like a connoisseur.
Steady rain. A gnatcatcher flutters to find breakfast on the undersides of leaves, then retreats to the shelter of the lilac to shake the water off. A chipmunk runs under my chair to eat one seed at the far end of the porch.
Cool and increasingly cloudy as the sun clears the treetops—a bright spot in the gray. A rose-breasted grosbeak sings. Chipmunk metronomes go in and out of sync.
A damp sunrise after thunderstorms in the night. Waves of scent from the lilac, whose blossoms are beginning to fade and droop. The nonstop chatter of goldfinches.
An hour before sunrise, the blood-curdling shrieks and snarls of a raccoon, accompanied by the piping of her terrified kits. A barred owl offers commentary from the woods’ edge. I remain in the dark.