In the soft light of a half-hidden sun, the old red maple beside the road is ruddy with blossoms. The sound of teeth chiselling a walnut.
Plummer’s Hollow
Clear and cold. The continual, waxy chatter of goldfinches, their plumage now a patchwork of winter’s dull green and summer’s crayon yellow.
One wood frog still calls in the marshy corner of the field, late for the orgy. Under the porch railing, the first, tiny spiders of spring.
The sun shines through gauzy clouds, giving the morning a faded-photo effect. A squirrel drinks from the stream. A cowbird’s liquid note.
Sunrise, and seven species of birds are calling—but not the phoebe, who flies in and out of the old nest under the springhouse eaves.
Before sunrise, I’m fascinated by the yard’s labyrinth of dead grass, that tangled thatch. A robin warbles for a while and falls silent.
Backlit by the sun, the one branch of marcescent oak leaves at the woods’ edge looks like a bough of orange flowers, old before their time.
At mid-morning, a low, heavy cloud ceiling that muffles sound. The first snowflakes wander in, accompanied by a song sparrow’s jaunty tune.
The first daffodils are in bloom in the cool sunlight, facing in all directions from a tight huddle. The neighbors’ rooster crows and crows.
At the woods’ edge, the tulip poplar sprouts a scarlet thorn: pileated woodpecker. A gust of wind drops a dried leaf into my lap.
Trees rock and sway in the wind—still the quiet wind of winter, hissing only in the pines. The startled flute of a mourning dove’s wings.
Overcast and damp. The distant calls of a killdeer, returning from migration and spying the valley’s alluringly barren fields.
At first light, off in the fog, the weird, nasal calls of timberdoodles. One launches into the air with a whistling of wings.
Sound is out of the east: quarry trucks and grinders. In the gray woods, gray squirrels glide silently over the rain-slicked leaf duff.