Rain clouds have settled in among the trees with their bodies like smoke. Wood frogs and forest salamanders must be stirring in their death-like sleep.
Dave Bonta
3/1/2024
At the end of a tunnel of shining twigs, the rising sun. A red-bellied woodpecker whinnies from the top of a locust tree. The furnace under my house rumbles to life.
2/29/2024
Leap Day. The trees sway and clatter; winter is back. A small cloud turns pink.
2/28/2024
Fog full of birdsong. I look up from the page to a rumble of thunder that makes the windows shake.
2/27/2024
Swans before dawn, their moonlit cries drifting down from over the north end of the mountain. A quiet trickle from the stream. The scent of thawed earth.
2/26/2024
Mid-morning with the sun full in my face, listening to the roof drip onto the roof. A chickadee sings his spring song, and a little later, so does the song sparrow.
2/25/2024
Red dawn with a moon like a searchlight sinking into the powerline cut. The cardinal debuts a new call with what sounds like a glottal stop in the middle: chee-er, chee-er.
2/24/2024
The woods are far more brown than white after yesterday’s warmth. I glance up from my book to a splash of yellow in the clouds, lapsing into another day’s gray.
2/23/2024
Foggy at dawn with sound out of the east—the quarry instead of the interstate. Gray-green lichens glow on the rain-darkened trunks of sweet birches all along the edge of the woods.
2/22/2024
Overcast at sunrise, but the cloud lid lifts enough for the sun to glimmer through when it crests the ridge. Saturday’s snow is looking threadbare—a disintegrating shroud over the not-yet dead.
2/21/2024
Cold and mostly clear at sunrise. Long before the sun clears the ridge, the bright red cardinal is tapping at all my windows.
2/20/2024
In the rising sun’s slow shadow-play projected onto the snow, sleeping trees drift on a sea of glitter. A visitation of wings.
2/19/2024
Cold and still at sunrise. A chipmunk pops up from under the house and scuttles over to the stone wall, where it stops to watch the clouds turn colors.
2/18/2024
Through two hats and a hood, the wind’s bitter whisper reaches my ear. Odd moans and creaking sounds issue from the trees, whose dark silhouettes stretch between two absences. Then first light and the cooing of doves.