Heavy cloud cover. A gray squirrel chiseling open a walnut squats on a low branch with its tail curled over its head for warmth.
Plummer’s Hollow
Snowflakes floating down from a patchy sky, where the third-quarter moon appears and disappears. The distant fluting of geese.
A lull in the rains. The transition from a watercolor world to pencil-brown and charcoal-gray is nearly complete.
Steady drumming of rain on the porch roof. Dark trunks disappearing into fog. A classic November day.
A flock of juncos at the woods’ edge, between me and the sun: shining wings against dark trunks, a blinding quiver of rays.
Clear and cold. With the power out, morning is a logistical challenge, but when I have the time to sit, the sparrows are singing as usual.
5:20. Bleary-eyed smudge of an eclipsed moon above the western ridge. 6:20. Pink clouds turn orange. The first song sparrow.
Clear and cooler. A female cardinal flies out of a barberry bush, her bill red as the berries. Crows argue over fresh additions to the compost.
Daybreak. A buck sniffing the ground for signs of estrus scratches his head with a back hoof. A mosquito sings into my ear.
Unseasonably warm with a lowering sky. A six-point buck emerges from the woods and struts over to the stream as a doe looks on.
Cold sunrise. The green hippogriff of a lilac just starting to yellow. Dry leaves whispering of deer in heat.
Cold and clear at sunrise, with sound out of the east: the quarry’s daily grind instead of the interstate. A jay answers a reverse-beeping truck.
Sun through a scrim of cloud. From within a flame-leaved barberry bush, the crisp ticking of a junco.
Clouds selectively erasing the stars at dawn. A strong inversion layer: traffic noise from the interstate mingles with barred owl calls.