The sun comes out. A green shield bug flies in and lands on a porch column like a freelance leaf. I’m reminded to check when the equinox is.
Plummer’s Hollow
Rain from a named storm seems special, like strands of hair from someone famous. Two spring peepers are calling, and faintly, the phoebe.
Sun! The meadow glows goldenrod-yellow. Birch leaves at the woods’ edge tremble with warblers. A mosquito sings her thirsty note in my ear.
It’s been 20 years since the butternut tree fell over, but I still miss it: the sky too big, too blank, the nuthatch’s call too far away.
The dampness thickens into drizzle. Its soundtrack: the unending trill of tree crickets. The forest begins to glisten like a salamander.
Foggy at dawn. When I open the door, a Carolina wren zips out of the old hornets’ nest under the porch roof and disappears into the lilac.
Home! A migrant wood thrush softly calls over the roar of the rain-swollen creek. In the big tulip tree, a squirrel is building a drey.
The yellowthroat’s song is half submerged in noise from the quarry. A heron flies over. I watch my breath drift away toward the east.
Dawn. Thin fog infiltrates the trees’ pointillist green. A whip-poor-will calls at the woods’ edge with the absolute conviction of the mad.
The all-night rain has eased into drizzle. A drenched squirrel plods through the yard. A catbird appears on a branch and sings half a note.
Black-throated green warbler. I fetch my chair from the creek where the storm blew it. High over the neighboring valley, a killdeer’s cry.
Cloudy and cool. The great-crested flycatchers are back with their dinosaur calls. From down-hollow, the faint carillon of a wood thrush.
Three days of heat have fuzzed the treetops in gray-green gauze. A warbler wheezes. The breeze makes an empty beer bottle moan.
A squirrel emerges beside the one white miniature daffodil, just coming into bloom as the others shrivel. A Baltimore oriole’s glossy song.