Gray sky in which the sun slowly surfaces like a carp in a murky pond. Rain-slick leaves glisten. A great spangled fritillary zigzags past.
Plummer’s Hollow
Weak sunlight: a milkiness in the sky like the film that forms over the eyes of the dead. A lone fawn runs bleating through the forest.
Bright sun and the clearest air in weeks. The familiar woods 50 feet away is a dark wall with here and there a loophole of intense green.
An early-morning storm rumbles off to the north. Flashes of scarlet: tanager at the woods’ edge, ruby-throated hummingbird at the beebalm.
Sunrise, and the cricket music is augmented by a trio of chipping sparrows, the fledgling begging for food while its parents mate.
The light between showers. A groundhog plows through the stiltgrass in the yard. Later, two chipmunks touch noses at the end of the porch.
A question mark butterfly on the railing next to my boots. A cuckoo’s soft call sounds like an answer to the incessant caws of a crow.
Unsettled weather; the leaves on the trees turn this way and that. Two turkey vultures circle high above the ridge, rocking in the wind.
I look up from my book and realize it’s raining again, a downward shimmer. I try forgetting the names of unseen birds—this buzz, that cry.
A squirrel stymied in crossing the porch by my unexpected presence approaches warily, watching me the way a farmer watches the weather.
A great spangled fritillary lands in the grass, folds its orange wings shut and turns into a dead leaf, barely moving for the next hour.
Yarrow, fleabane, silky dogwood… white is in style. But the cabbage white butterflies still prefer the purple remnants of dame’s-rocket.
A chipmunk scurries through the garden with a wad of dried leaves between her teeth and disappears beneath a flowerless clump of peonies.
Overcast and cool. It takes me a while to notice that a cherry tree has fallen into the meadow 50 feet away, half-buried in the tall weeds.