Cold and clear. Stripes of sunlight don’t distinguish between the gold on the trees and the gold already on the ground: everything glows.
Plummer’s Hollow
10/10/2009
Coming back from the Adirondacks, I find a different mountain: much redder and yellower than it was a week ago, and much less mountainous.
10/4/2009
[Gone camping in the Adirondacks. Back in five or six days.]
10/3/2009
Thick fog. Silence punctuated by the muffled thuds of black walnuts landing on the lawn. The distant, mad cackle of a pileated woodpecker.
10/2/2009
Cold drizzle. The burble of a song sparrow. A flycatcher of indeterminate species flutters up from the foxtail millet beside the stream.
10/1/2009
A sudden commotion of geese. I run to scan the sky out of habit, as if they were migratory, and their “V” still a horn open to the north.
9/30/2009
The sky begins to clear by late morning. I get up from my reading about the extinction of rare frogs and go out again to shiver in the sun.
9/29/2009
Under a white sky, the trees rock and sway, showing the pale undersides of their leaves—a palms-up gesture of welcome or helplessness.
9/28/2009
Brief shower from a blue sky; a rumble of thunder. Goldenrod by the woods’ edge is turning yellow for the second time with fallen leaves.
9/27/2009
Two gray squirrels in their fall colors—snouts and bellies stained brown from walnut hulls—dash past each other on the rain-slick trunk.
9/26/2009
Overcast and cool with jays, jays, jays. A red-tailed hawk’s pale breast flashing through the leaves, the sound of wingtips clipping limbs.
9/25/2009
All the small birds converge on a birch tree to scold some hidden thing. It never stirs. They drift away. Sunlight settles on the leaves.
9/24/2009
Pieces of walnut husk plop onto the driveway. A yellow leaf trapped by caterpillar silk flops like a fish a foot above the fishless stream.
9/23/2009
At first light, the soft wickering of migrant wood thrushes. A deer snorts three times, and suddenly I’m seeing a bear in every shadow.