Every morning more yellow in the woods. What’s happening while we sleep? An unseen full moon. Migrant thrushes descending through the clouds at dawn.
Plummer’s Hollow
9/28/2023
Clear and cold, with sound out of the east: the rumble and squeal of a slow freight train. Jays jeer. A wren puts the kettle on.
9/27/2023
An hour past sunrise and the sky is brightening. A red-bellied woodpecker makes anxious chirps, prompting a flicker to respond. A tree drops a dead limb into last year’s leaves.
9/26/2023
Rain: on the roofs drumming, in the meadow a whisper and in the forest a quiet roar. It lasts for hours. The cold creeps under my coat.
9/25/2023
A few minutes before sunrise, a crack followed by a crash from just inside the woods. I delude myself that I can detect the type of tree: sounds like a red maple, I’d say. So unlike the way they come into the world—miniature claws already red with autumn.
9/24/2023
Cold wind and rain, belied by all the cheerful yellow starting to move from the goldenrod up into the trees at the woods’ edge.
9/23/2023
Overcast and still, with a low rumble of traffic from the east. In the half-light, a deer’s ear pivots among the goldenrod.
9/22/2023
Cool but not quite as clear, with a thin, high scrim of clouds and the incessant beeping of quarry trucks, to which a migrant phoebe briefly responds.
9/21/2023
Dawn: the red thread of a contrail fraying as it fades. Fog rises from the goldenrod, erasing the faint dot that must’ve been Mercury.
9/20/2023
Clearing enough by 8:00 for the sun to nest in the treetops. Highway noise subsides, giving way to the knocks and clatter of falling walnuts and acorns, the scold-calls of chipmunks, the jeers of jays.
9/19/2023
Another cool and quiet autumn morning. The snakeroot has faded to a blowsy brown just as the goldenrod reaches its pinnacle of yellow.
9/18/2023
Half an hour past sunrise, the top of the tall tulip poplar turns gold. But I notice that yellow leaves continue down the tree. One sails out into the goldenrod.
9/17/2023
Gray sky ten minutes after a flaming sunrise. A phoebe calls for old times’ sake. Quarry trucks rumble through the gap.
9/15/2023
43F/6C an hour after sunrise. Not a cloud in the sky. Black walnuts crash down at random intervals.