The red and scarlet oaks have finally turned their namesake colors, and the whole ridge shines like a fresh gut pile in the sun.
The tulip tree in the yard has reached that stage where it could be sculpture, each remaining yellow leaf placed just so, jeered at by jays.
A rattle of falling acorns where jays forage. Two pileated woodpeckers in succession land on the dead elm, red crests blazing in the sun.
A squirrel on an oak limb freezes in alarm at the figure passing underneath, that blaze-orange cap a color no longer found in the trees.
Cold and mostly clear. A pileated woodpecker riot of one vents its fury in a glowing, golden canopy of chestnut oaks.
Gray in the west, yellow in the east, blue overhead. A tiny sharp-shinned hawk lands in a yard tree and only one squirrel bothers to scold.
Warm eddies mingle with the cold. A flock of sparrows moves through the meadow, singing, twittering, setting the goldenrod heads asway.
In the big oaks tossing in the wind, finally some splotches of color. A freight train’s out-of-tune horn blows a chord unknown to music.
Goldfinches repopulate a leafless birch and sit eating seeds. From the east, the sound of the quarry’s crusher, its breakfast of stones.
Sun through thin, high clouds—light for a much milder morning than this one in which periwinkle leaves glitter with melting hoarfrost.
The wind persists, and now that the walnut trees are bare I can see the aspens by the marsh, their perpetually agitated crowds yellowing up.
Over the wind, the twittering of chickadees trailing a flock of kinglets into the birches. Two brown creepers appear on adjacent trunks.
Cloudy and cold. The soft back-and-forth of sparrows flitting between woods and meadow. The distant keening of an ambulance.
Snowflakes backlit by the sun. Unlike rain they don’t just fall; they fly. A strip of bark is draped over a birch twig like a spare tie.