Another still, cold sunrise. I watch Venus creeping through the crown of a black locust, dwindling to a point that finally vanishes behind a flotilla of small clouds.
Plummer’s Hollow
November 25, 2023
Cold and still for the opening day of rifle season. Distant booms set the crows off. The sun is a bright smudge in a sky more white than blue.
November 24, 2023
Overcast but bright. I watch small flocks of birds move through the tops of the birches: juncos, kinglets, goldfinches, each skeletal crown studded with winged jewels.
November 23, 2023
Blue-gray layered with yellow-orange a half hour past sunrise. The creek is still singing about Tuesday’s rain, and the one oak at the woods’ edge that always holds onto its dead leaves hisses in the wind.
November 22, 2023
Wet and overcast at sunrise. The forest floor with its carpet of leaves almost glows for a minute or two before subsiding into ordinary brown.
November 21, 2023
Dawn. A rustle in the leaves as bits of ice and half-frozen raindrops begin falling from the sky. From the lilac, the ticking of a wren.
November 20, 2023
Crystal-clear and very still at dawn. A last meteor disappears into the spreading spill of light on the eastern horizon.
November 19, 2023
Waiting for the sun as the western ridge turns from pink to orange to yellow. The plastic flamingo in my garden is furred with frost.
November 17, 2023
A few degrees above freezing. In the half dark I can just make out a spider descending from the rafters into my lap. Where is she off to, I wonder, so late in the year?
November 16, 2023
Venus like a searchlight through the bare trees. A great-horned owl calls on the far side of the ridge, but gets no response. He tries again. Silence.
November 15, 2023
Cold and still at sunrise. The western ridge turns from barn-red to gold, like an autumn in reverse.
November 14, 2023
Sunrise hidden by a layer of cloud. A white-footed mouse explores the corrugated roof over my oil tanks, its likely sickness shown by its lack of fear.
November 13, 2023
22F/-5C at sunrise. Every twig and leaf is lightly frosted. I watch my clouds of breath drift into the yard.
November 12, 2023
Sun through thin, high clouds—enough to make the last few scarlet oak crowns glow. An ambulance wails through the gap.