Another bright sunny morning—meaning the shadows are deep and full of unseen singers: scarlet tanager, cerulean warbler, even a wood thrush.
Plummer’s Hollow
Strands of caterpillar silk float on the breeze, appearing and disappearing as they pass through sunbeams. Ravens’ falsetto alarm calls.
The crash of a falling limb or tree, muffled by moss and damp leaf duff. The humidity’s lifting. A white admiral butterfly lands on my hand.
Overcast and humid. A brown leafhopper appears on my arm, and I nudge it with my finger to watch its improbable rocket-launch of a leap.
Noise from the quarry—a grinding drone that runs under everything: oriole song, woodpecker drumming, a hummingbird’s Geiger-counter clicks.
A cricket in the wall chirps more quickly now that the sun is on it. I sneeze and he falls silent. A great spangled fritillary careens past.
Gray things: a squirrel and a titmouse sharing a gray limb. A catbird in the road swallowing gray stones. Large parts of the sky.
A filmy-winged fly back-lit by the sun yo-yos up and down in the middle of the yard, despite the stiff breeze. Overhead, a vulture circling.
Everything moves in the wind but the broken dog statue, the dead rosebush, and the five-fingered cherry stump raised as if in surrender.
Batting away a hornet hovering next to my legs—the softness of its wings. A chipmunk adds its metronome to the chorus of bird calls.
A weird cry, like an alarm clock keening for consummation: a lone 17-year cicada, far from the main body of its brood. It stops. It resumes.
Wind salted with rain. A male indigo bunting clings to a black cherry branch like the one blue leaf, fluttering with the rest.
Heard but not seen: two blue jays commenting on the woods below. Seen but not heard: two gray squirrels sneaking under the house.
The air is so clear, I can make out grains of pollen drifting back and forth against the dark woods. The shrill alarm-calls of a raven.