A degree or two below freezing at dawn. The flat-tire moon fades into obscurity in the middle of a cloudless sky. The ridge turns red.
Plummer’s Hollow
Gray aftermath of a strormy night. Still no phoebe or field sparrow. An icy breeze.
Dawn arrives between showers. I think about all the cicada larvae of Brood XIV stirring under the ground, preparing for the last and most eventful spring of their lives.
Overcast and quiet. The gray hulk of a dead red maple by the road has dropped another small limb—former rung on my favorite ladder into the sky when I was small.
A few degrees above freezing and very still. The full moon hangs above the western ridge, fresh from its run-in with the earth’s shadow, glowing yellow.
Red not where the sun rises but where the clouds are thin, off to the north. A silent crow takes a seat in the treetops. The thump of a squirrel falling to the forest floor.
Overcast at sunrise, the clouds begin to show cracks of blue. A song sparrow continues with his hip-hip-hurrahing long after the others have gone off to forage.
Another crystal-clear dawn. A song sparrow and a Carolina wren are trading licks, following initial solos from a robin and a cardinal, all over the whine of traffic.
In the half dark, the roar of Monday morning traffic from over the ridge. The last stars fade. A cardinal pipes up.
Clear and still, despite the madness of clocks losing an hour. Woodpecker drums. A squirrel rummaging through last year’s leaves.
Half an inch of wet snow has turned things white again, if not for long: the wind blows clumps of snow from the trees. The sun comes up.
Windy, cold and clear at dawn. A song sparrow pipes up from the depths of the lilac. The ridge turns red.
When the wind dies, I can hear the roaring of the creek. I sit in the dark, composing a limerick in my head.
Rain. The stone-wall chipmunk races across the yard and disappears into the woods. The rattle of my metal roofs drowns out everything but a train horn.