I hear it before I see it through the trees, crackling and popping in the tinder-dry sticks and leaf litter: a small herd of deer.
Plummer’s Hollow
The corpse of a moth flaps upside-down against the column. Beyond the springhouse, a broken branch dangles—the leaves’ pale undersides.
Overcast at dawn except for a thin band on the horizon—enough for the light to leak through and spread its stain across the entire sky.
Orion gets one leg above the trees before fading into the dawn. Inside, I rescue the cricket from a spider, put him out for the fourth time.
Cloudy and cool. From the wood’s edge, a new song, wistful yet ebullient, from our most faithful, year-round singer, the Carolina wren.
From the vicinity of the powerline—a stripe of sunlight through the woods—the sporadic want… want… want of a buck coming into rut.
A cloudless sunrise. The woods are full of soft chirps—migrants, I suppose. Up by the barn, a phoebe calls for the first time in weeks.
Windy and cool at sunrise. A large squadron of geese comes low over the porch—non-migrant locals, no doubt, infected with restlessness.
High cumulonimbus drifting northward is the only sign of a hurricane’s distant churn. Tiny figures of birds head west toward the open sky.
A steady clatter of acorns from a squirrel foraging in the crown of an oak. Could it be dropping them on purpose for later retrieval?
A goldfinch gone green lands among walnut leaves that have gone yellow. Below, a juvenile red-bellied woodpecker, nape turning orange.
Three small flies gather on the top railing, wandering back and forth on the straight white road like lost commuters. Today will be hot.
A gray squirrel nibbles on tansy leaves—how odd!—then comes onto the porch and stares at me from two feet away with dark unreadable eyes.
As the plane fades in the distance, they return: a towhee, two lethargic vireos, a chipmunk’s water-drip-steady clucks, the garden cricket.