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.
11/15/2023
Cold and still at sunrise. The western ridge turns from barn-red to gold, like an autumn in reverse.
11/14/2023
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.
11/13/2023
22F/-5C at sunrise. Every twig and leaf is lightly frosted. I watch my clouds of breath drift into the yard.
11/12/2023
Sun through thin, high clouds—enough to make the last few scarlet oak crowns glow. An ambulance wails through the gap.
11/11/2023
A few patches of frost in the yard as the sun clears the ridgetop. Juncos move through the rambling old lilac, its last few leaves faded nearly to yellow.
11/10/2023
Overcast and quiet an hour before sunrise. Hunters’ headlamps move back and forth on the dark hillside like lost stars.
11/9/2023
it starts raining just as I come out on the porch, completing the November trinity: cold, gray, and wet. Goldfinch chatter. The keening of truck tires on the interstate.
11/8/2023
The sun clears the ridge and I’m blinded—the oaks are mostly bare now. Those that aren’t, glow red like a scattering of old barns.
11/7/2023
Breezy and warm. With each gust of wind, a flotilla of leaves sets sail from the big tulip tree, as the sun ascends a ladder of clouds.
11/6/2023
Sunrise glowing orange between the half-naked ridgetop oaks. The yard fills with small birds: sparrows, kinglets, the inevitable wren.
11/5/2023
Overcast sunrise for the return to standard time. The restless footsteps of a buck below the house, carrying his rack of bare branches into the woods.
11/4/2023
Thin clouds turn livid for the sunrise. A chickadee twitters. Two minutes later, we’re back to gloom.
11/3/2023
On a cloudless, quiet mid-morning after a heavy frost, the ground remains white only in the shadows. A single orange leaf falls from the tall tulip poplar, spiraling slowly down into the dead goldenrods.