Deep blue sky. A squirrel is making unusually exuberant, risky leaps from tree to tree, flinging herself into space, trusting in twigs.
Plummer’s Hollow
Mackerel sky like a furrowed brow. One, three, six blue jays descend on the feeder. The squirrel flees. One jay screams like a hawk.
My brother pauses in the yard to talk about the waves of migrant birds I’d missed by sleeping in, his face strangely lit by reflected light.
The bird feeder’s up; chickadees rejoice. One pauses to wipe its bill on a bare branch. A red-breasted nuthatch darts in and out, squeaking.
The first snow—a light dusting on the porch and in the yard. Oak leaves take to the sky. A hawk hurtles past in the ridgetop wind.
The tulip tree next to the springhouse is nearly bare, its last few leaves waving like four-fingered cartoon hands as the sky darkens to rain.
Clear and cold. A sound like a cat mewing, then a creaking door: just a jay. The sun pierces the thinning forest with one gimlet beam.
Five minutes after I check the weather app to verify it’s going to stay cloudy, the sun comes out. The damp forest glistens like a salamander.
Pouring rain—that thunderous arrhythmic percussion on the roof. The muted red and gold of the oaks give the forest a faint glow.
With so many other trees bare now, the tulip poplars have come into their glory: under a dark sky, columns of softly rustling gold.
The green alien at the center of my view—the sprawling old lilac—has at last begun to yellow. The wingbeats of a crow break the silence.
Rainy and cold. The distant firing of a semi-automatic rifle, muffled by valley fog, sounds like nothing so much as a crepitating fart.
Cold and gray. A downy woodpecker forages in the road, joined by a nuthatch, seemingly curious about this stony alternative to a tree trunk.
Overcast and chilly, with enough of a breeze to make the salmon-colored cherry leaves shiver against an increasingly gray backdrop of woods.