Fresh snow, but not enough to turn the hillside white. Like an old man with bushy brows, the earth peeks out from under every arched leaf.
I sit in the dark listening to the downpour, trying to pick out all the different instruments: roof, road, weeds, trees, leaf litter, creek.
Thick fog prolongs the dawn light for hours. A screech owl is answered by a pileated woodpecker, dirge giving way to second-line ululation.
Two white-tailed deer leap through the dried goldenrod and asters beyond the springhouse, surfacing, diving—dolphins in a brown sea.
At first light, a siren goes off and doesn’t stop, a high steady note as if from a Tibetan prayer bowl. Please God, I mutter, make it stop.
The urgent grunts of a buck in rut chasing two does through the laurel, their movements easy to follow now that the trees are nearly bare.
Cold and overcast. Four silent bluebirds drop into the spicebush in my herb garden and begin gobbling the blood-red drupes, stones and all.
A hard rain overnight has reduced the forest canopy to tatters. Where cherry leaves had hung, nothing but beads of water reflecting the sky.
The wind is out of the east, bringing routine news of violence to the pitted earth. A bare birch at the woods’ edge fills up with finches.
Rounding the corner of the house, I spot a reflection in my living room window and stop short: leaves of all colors. The change is upon us.