Warm and humid. A hummingbird interrupts my writing, hovering in front of my face, then zipping up to where a feeder once hung.
One gray squirrel shadows another, nose to tail, down the gray driveway. Mid-morning thunder. A patter of rain.
A deer grazes a few feet away; I can hear blades of grass tearing. The sun almost breaks through a thin spot in the clouds.
A catbird looks for worms in the herb garden. The first bindweed trumpets blare their silent music into a cloudless sky.
Windy and cool. The pale undersides of leaves turning in unison like shoals of fish. A robin and a tanager trading off.
Wind has blown all the humidity out to sea. The forest is astir with its comings and goings, until I can barely remain seated.
Hazy and humid. The sun in the crown of the big dead maple. A hen turkey putting like a slow motor, summoning her chicks.
The sun clears the trees sooner than seems possible, and the gnatcatcher’s extreme excitement is not a good sign. A sapsucker calls.
Rain thickens into downpour, but a very small moth continues to fly back and forth. The evening primroses remain half closed.
An odor from my childhood: the humid oak forest of my grandparents’ South Jersey yard. A chipmunk dashes under my chair.
When the clouds move off, an orbweaver’s web appears in the corner of a porch balustrade, shimmering as it pulses in the breeze.
Writing on the porch for a while, I am confronted, every time I look up, by three bracken fronds in my yard that have already turned yellow, like needlessly complex skeletons of fish.
A gnatcatcher is searching for breakfast on the undersides of leaves. A redstart lands on the porch railing and cocks her head at me.
Just past sunrise, a clearing wind. I look up from the Eastern Europe of my book to flame-bellied clouds, the forest all astir.