A pair of cardinals chirp back and forth in the lilac. A small buck with antlers in velvet crashes out of the woods, chased by a larger doe.
Plummer’s Hollow
Caterpillar webs in the treetops shine like white sails against the blue. A turkey vulture floats past.
A shimmer in the air thickens into drizzle, dripping from bedraggled rudbeckia petals, limp tubes of bergamot and the crisp, white soapwort.
Weeding the garden is never dull. Yesterday morning a milk snake writhed around my wrist; today, hornets boil up and sting my hand.
Quarry roar, how I have not missed you! But from the other direction, out of the mist, the yellow-billed cuckoo’s soft call.
It’s humid; everything drips. Goldfinches warble in the treetops. A rabbit’s ear twitches, illuminated by the rising sun.
Back from London, my ears are still adjusting to the country. The unending insect thrum seems to come from some city hidden in the grass.
In the two months I’ve been away, my yard and garden have turned alien, taken over by stiltgrass. The buzz of a hummingbird in the bergamot.
Overcast and cool. The catbird takes a break from improvising on the songs of other birds to tangle with his reflection in my front window.
I will be gone from my porch until mid-August. You can check the site daily to read previous years’ posts in the sidebar, if you like. Better yet, wherever you live, take a little time each morning to pay attention to the world, distill it into a sentence or two and share it on your favorite social networks.
It’s raining. The chickadees have fledged and gone, and their hole in the cherry stump seems as empty as a skull’s eye socket.
A butterfly morning. Silver-spotted skippers chase through the dame’s-rocket while red-spotted purples contend for supremacy over the porch.
The tall tulip poplar is in bloom, yellow dishes open to the flat-white sky as if waiting for a radio signal or a morsel of sun.
A deer at the edge of the rain-drenched meadow seems rooted to the spot. At last I glimpse beneath her belly the ears of a very small fawn.
On a dark, rainy morning, the flashing orange light on the meter reader’s truck. A heron flies over the house—its long, skinny legs.