Up before dawn, I watch the morning star climbing through the treetops. The birds awake: fragments of song like an orchestra tuning up.
Plummer’s Hollow
Wood thrushes dart back and forth; three squirrel species briefly converge. My yard is less comprehensible to me than a street in Bangkok.
The female towhee chitters until the male flies in, mates, and flies off. Again. Once more. Then she craps and goes back to foraging.
Light rain. A female towhee carries load after load of dead grass into a rosebush while a yearling male redstart sings and noshes in the treetops.
A dandelion-seed parachute drifting past the porch shudders, hit by a raindrop. The streambank grass ripples where a chipmunk runs.
The clouds finally thin out at mid-morning. An orange skipper passes over the thin-bladed grass to settle on the sunny half of a dock leaf.
So clear, even the mourning dove sounds joyful. Muffled thuds of a pileated in a dead tree, knocking—as Rumi would say—from the inside.
Cool and quiet—a thoroughly dull morning, I’m thinking. Just then a hen turkey lands in the yard with a clamor of wings and saunters off.
Hard rain forces the phoebes to dive into the weeds in search of prey, returning drenched to their dry and querulous brood under the eaves.
A blue-gray gnatcatcher hoovering insects from the cherry leaves hovers almost like a hummingbird, I think, until the real thing zooms by.
At daybreak, a small deer leaps and twists like a bronco with an invisible rider, then careens through the purple haze of dame’s-rocket.
From the luminous green wall of the woods, a pewee calls. Maple keys come spinning, take the place of yesterday’s hailstones on the porch.
Yes, I can watch tanagers in the treetops, a hooded warbler in the bush. But just over the ridge, the interstate howls. There’s no escape.
From the moment I come out, the world conspires to wake me up: yesterday, the tulip tree dropped a branch; today, a Cooper’s hawk swoops in.