Sunlight struggles through the haze. The large black-and-blue butterfly known as a red-spotted purple keeps returning to my red porch floor.
Plummer’s Hollow
Just after daylight, the sound of a shower approaching and petering out before it reaches the porch. Two chickadees flit through the bushes.
Cool but humid. A vireo sings quietly, as if talking to himself. One of those quick, small flies cleans its wings with its hind-most legs.
Green blur: a hummingbird. Two or three pileated woodpeckers cackle back and forth. The meter reader’s truck, its flashing yellow light.
Again it takes a finger of sun to draw my attention to something in plain sight: the foxtail millet heads—tails?—bent low by their seeds.
A field cricket chirps and falls silent, but the tree crickets never stop trilling. A small, purple tuft lit up by the sun: Canada thistle.
A katydid that had been perched on my chair leg walks jerkily across the porch and stops in the shadow of a railing, outlandishly green.
A wood thrush fledgling lands on the lower bar of the fretwork spandrel, breast feathers disheveled, eyerings imparting a look of surprise.
Tiny ants are digging holes in the tansy flowers—yellow eyes with seething black pupils. A single-propeller plane: the sound of a clear day.
Sitting outside with my laptop, blind to the world. A phoebe flies past two feet from my nose, followed a minute later by a hummingbird.
A phoebe dives at a cabbage white butterfly and comes up short. It zigzags after it, hovers, snaps again: only a tiny piece of white wing.
The yark, yark of ravens skimming the trees, the low cloud ceiling just above. Crushing humidity. Vegetation still drips from a dawn storm.
Cloudless and cool. The only cricket sound is a low murmur. From up in the woods, the distant crashing of deer running through the laurel.
Six times in a row, the wood pewee chimes in right after the field sparrow. Don’t tell me birds don’t sing in part for the pleasure of it.