Silhouetted against the dawn sky, a wedge of geese intersects the treetops’ lace. In the pauses between calls, the hush of wings.
After last night’s rain, everything glistens but the four gray forms of deer beneath the lilac, their thin clouds of breath.
Halfway up the ridge, a flashlight bobs through the trees, stops, goes out. Then the rustling thuds of hooves in dry leaves. Then silence.
The bubbling song of a wren in the half-dark makes it suddenly half-light. From now till blue noon, everything else is a footnote.
Wind out of the east, and with it the noise of cars and trucks and trains funneled up the hollow’s half a horn. A smudge of sun.
An eight-point buck struts through the neck-high meadow, stirring up sparrows and goldenrod fluff, lifting his tail to shit while he walks.
After a warm night, half the lilac’s leaves are brown and curling. What is it about warmth this time of year that makes it so debilitating?
A squirrel places a walnut in a small high crotch in the lilac and departs, like the Andrew Goldsworthy of squirrels. A junco lands, looks.
Halfway up the ridge, a dangling oak limb broken by last month’s snowstorm suddenly crashes to the ground, still clinging to its leaves.
The latched door beneath the porch stands ajar. I step gingerly through the frost-edged blades of grass, carrying my coffee like a lamp.
Shadows of bare branches on the stark white side of my house like a portent of winter. A flock of 13 geese splits, re-forms, makes a U-turn.
I hear the grunting of a buck in rut, but see only a grown fawn chasing a doe. As they pass below the porch, I hear the bleat in his voice.
Two decades of porch-sitting, and I still can’t shake the illusion that my feet are propped on the railing of a ship that never leaves port.
Nothing of note this morning, I’m tempted to say. But even the random arrangement of walnut leaf ribs on the red floorboards is beautiful.