A thin wash of cloud at sunrise, and the yard gray with frost. A raven flies low over the hollow giving two-syllable croaks.
Plummer’s Hollow
Flakes in the air. The lilac leaves hold on, faded and stiff. And with my brown clothes and dark red hat, I suddenly realize I match the oaks.
The streamside barberry is orange as a hunter’s cap. A crow silhouetted against the sunrise swipes its bill on the branch as if sharpening a knife.
Rising late to a sky as gray as my head. Quarry trucks are beeping. The Carolina wren has switched to a minor key.
A wren calls under the porch. It’s five degrees below freezing. An inversion layer brings the whine of tires over the ridge, red with sunrise.
Clearing sky after a brief snow squall. The ridgeside, slick with leaves of slowly fading colors, shines like a salamander in the sun.
A blank gray sky, this time of year, is the easiest kind to read: snow, it says, in a slowly accelerating tumble of pure punctuation.
Cold and gray. Goldenrod seed heads like white-haired old men nodding and whispering far-fetched conspiracy theories about a coming winter.
Clouds scudding against clouds, and here and there faint suggestions of blue: a clearing wind, complete with the obligatory exultant raven.
Two degrees above freezing, with the sun reduced to a bright smudge by a thin wash of cloud. Juncos and a nuthatch forage at the woods’ edge.
Dawn comes with a light breeze rummaging through the oaks, a freight train laboring up the valley, the tutting of robins.
Dawn silence. A distant Carolina wren. I’m standing outside in my PJs enjoying the relative warmth (38F) when I spot the first cloud in days.
Yet another bright blue October day a month late. The scarlet oak Dad and I planted 25 years ago is in its glory, redder than the sunrise.
A scrap of hornets’ gray paper by my chair. Sunlight catches a dead dame’s-rocket​ below the porch, seed pods reduced to pure gesture.