After a windy night, the forest is looking decidedly threadbare in its coat of many colors, illuminated each time the sun finds a hole in the clouds.
Plummer’s Hollow
In the half-light, a patter of hooves from just inside the woods. The grunts of a buck in rut. A dawn sky coming through the trees.
Between dawn and sunrise, a small rainstorm’s pleasant susurration drowns out everything else. As it eases, a Carolina wren takes over, caroling in a minor key.
One degree above freezing and very still. I add my breath to the ground fog rising through yellow leaves into the sunlight.
A flat white sky crossed by a crow. Woods’-edge chipmunks in a chipping contest. The color.
Gloomy and cold at dawn. From the depths of the seed-laden goldenrod, the first, bright chips and whistles as the sparrow horde wakes up.
Still no frost. A Carolina wren putt-putts at the woods’ edge. From the powerline, a white-throated sparrow’s plaintive “Oh sweet Canada…”
Overcast but brightening. Snow birds are moving through the half-bare lilac, exchanging notes. Titmice and chickadees forage in the thinning birches.
The pleasing monotony of a cold autumn rain, drowning out all other sound except for a low throbbing in the distance. Leaves fall drunkenly, careening this way and that.
Six degrees above freezing and clear at sunrise. The spicebushes next to the road are at their most luminous yellow. Chipmunks tick like asynchronous clocks.
Under a thin grin of moon, the maples reclaiming their red. Three crows wake up with awe in their throats.
Within the moon’s crescent, its dark bulk is aglow—a reminder that Earth is still, somehow, a source of light. A towhee calls twice and goes back to sleep.
An hour before dawn, the crescent moon hangs just above the ridge, with Venus blazing like a campfire through the trees. It’s cold. An inversion layer brings the sound of every engine waking in the valley.
Windy and cold. In the wall of leaves at the woods’ edge, the first few fragments of what will be my winter sky.