Up in the woods, one witch hazel has already leafed out—a green flame. The rumble of a pickup approaching then failing to appear.
Plummer’s Hollow
A bright blue morning. It takes the drone of a plane to draw my attention to a new bird call: the first blue-headed vireo of the year.
The Carolina wren goes from querulous chirps to full-throated denunciations from the top of the dead cherry tree. But the snow continues.
Cold, gray and windy. The peony sprouts, up early this year, are still at the point of just untwisting their skinny red fists.
The top half of a dead elm behind the house crashes down in the wind. I remember the porcupine in its topmost branch like a crown of thorns.
Red maple limbs laden with keys tremble from a pell-mell squirrel. I hear tapping on the storm door, open it and a bee flies out.
A downy woodpecker has found a loud limb to hammer. When the din stops, he’s with a female. That brief cloacal kiss that passes for sex.
Clear and cold at sunrise. A nuthatch on the dark side of the tall tulip poplar reverses course and ascends into the sunlit crown.
I can’t stop looking at the vivid green lilac, translucent in the mid-morning sun. In the woods beyond, the laurel is a blaze of gloss.
A rabbit dashes around the yard, chased by another. It feints a departure and sneaks back, ears orange in the sun and veined like leaves.
An old strand of caterpillar silk at the wood’s edge shimmers in the sun. A crow keeps saying something urgent in four syllables.
Out in time for the second sunrise, when the sun clears the near ridge and appears among the trees, an impossible blossom.
Two pairs of pileated woodpeckers breakfast 100 feet apart, one on adjoining oaks and the other side by side on the trunk of a locust.
Thin fog. A yearling fawn play-mounts his mother, and is mounted in turn by his twin. A robin tut-tut-tuts from the driveway.