Two degrees below freezing. The sun is a bright smear in what could be a snow sky. A chickadee sings seemingly to itself.
Plummer’s Hollow
Two oak leaves are caught by a birch, one after the other. From somewhere in the clouds, the buzzing rattle of a plane with a loose part.
A few, tiny patches of snow linger behind clumps of dead stiltgrass. The sun blazes through the thinning crown of an oak; I start to sneeze.
Over the rumble of my furnace, the cries of tundra swans: a long, trembling thread of them high in the blue, wings sparkling like snow.
First snowfall of the year—a quarter inch. Newly fallen oak leaves roll across it, or scuttle like crabs on their curled lobe-tips.
A sudden fusillade of sleet. Just audible over the rattle: a blue jay doing its imitation of a red-tailed hawk.
All the most supine stiltgrass has grown white fur in the night. Two nuthatches foraging at the woods’ edge react badly to my sneeze.
It’s morning in America, and I’m looking at a deep blue sky and a hillside of oaks—rust-red leaves still hanging on. They glow in the sun.
With birches and maples at the woods’ edge all bare, I can see unimpeded up the hillside to small clouds lost among the trees and the rain.
The big dead elm has collapsed into the stream, its rain-slick bole broken in two places. A drenched phoebe hawks insects in the grass.
Yard seething with birds: sparrows, chickadees, a brown creeper. A raven flies past with something in its bill, wings going pfft pfft pfft.
Oak leaves that turned brown just a few days ago already rattle instead of rustling. A hunter in gray camouflage emerges from the woods.
A sparrow hawk makes two small, fast circles over the ridge, just like a real hawk. A barberry bush has this year’s only flaming foliage.
November 1st, and the stream’s gurgle sounds somehow different. A Halloween ladybug wanders the rectilinear wilderness of a porch column.