Thick fog. Silence punctuated by the muffled thuds of black walnuts landing on the lawn. The distant, mad cackle of a pileated woodpecker.
Cold drizzle. The burble of a song sparrow. A flycatcher of indeterminate species flutters up from the foxtail millet beside the stream.
A sudden commotion of geese. I run to scan the sky out of habit, as if they were migratory, and their “V” still a horn open to the north.
The sky begins to clear by late morning. I get up from my reading about the extinction of rare frogs and go out again to shiver in the sun.
Under a white sky, the trees rock and sway, showing the pale undersides of their leaves—a palms-up gesture of welcome or helplessness.
Brief shower from a blue sky; a rumble of thunder. Goldenrod by the woods’ edge is turning yellow for the second time with fallen leaves.
Two gray squirrels in their fall colors—snouts and bellies stained brown from walnut hulls—dash past each other on the rain-slick trunk.
Overcast and cool with jays, jays, jays. A red-tailed hawk’s pale breast flashing through the leaves, the sound of wingtips clipping limbs.
All the small birds converge on a birch tree to scold some hidden thing. It never stirs. They drift away. Sunlight settles on the leaves.
Pieces of walnut husk plop onto the driveway. A yellow leaf trapped by caterpillar silk flops like a fish a foot above the fishless stream.
At first light, the soft wickering of migrant wood thrushes. A deer snorts three times, and suddenly I’m seeing a bear in every shadow.
Blue jays in the rain, less blue than gray, converge on an oak one tree in from the edge, tails like hands spread for a throw of dice.
I dream of giant salamanders and wake to a pair of red-tailed hawks on the tree limb closest to the porch, heads pivoting like gun turrets.
The door under the porch is ajar, as if a bear or burglar had been there. Strangled cries from overhead: a crow diving at a slow hawk.