Rain mingled with the ticking of sleet. The early daffodils cluster together, heads nodding, like youths defying a social-distancing order.
Plummer’s Hollow
The sky unscarred by a single contrail is as blue as I’ve ever seen it. A hawk spirals higher and higher, unthreading gravity’s screw.
Each day the silence grows a little deeper. My self-isolating mother stops on her way past to pick a bouquet of just-opened daffodils.
Above the roar of the creek, the first phoebe, phoebe, phoebe. Harlequin ladybirds are emerging from the walls of the house and flying off.
The rain eases off by midday but the cowbird at the top of a tall black locust tree continues to spill his single, liquid note.
Through egg-white clouds that bright yolk. The hoarse but exuberant call of a red-winged blackbird echoes off the hillside.
In the fog and mizzle, swelling yellow-green lilac buds are the brightest thing. A single jet goes over in all the time I sit outside.
Bright sun. The damp ground glistens like a salamander. A jet goes over—the first I’ve heard in a while.
Rain past, the hollow is full of birds. Fast moving clouds. A Carolina wren sings exultantly through a high gust of wind.
Sun through thin clouds. A flash of red as a cardinal emerges from bathing in the stream. Two ravens croak back and forth, high and low.
Overcast and still. Two downy woodpeckers a quarter mile apart have found dead trees that, when hammered, ring at precisely the same pitch.
Overcast. A field sparrow’s ascending note. In the dead grass below the stone wall, an otherwise motionless garter snake tastes the air.
From up in the woods, the kak-kak-kak call of a Cooper’s hawk. The first question mark butterfly lands among dead leaves and vanishes.
In the deep blue, the only spots of white, high overhead, are swans: two large Vs tacking this way and that, trailing their piccolo notes.