BAM. BAM. BAM. The red crest of a pileated woodpecker flashes into view from the dead side of a maple, sunrise orange on the hill behind.
The yard’s alive with birds: sparrows, jays, robins. In the yellowing wall of foliage at the woods’ edge, I see the first chinks of sky.
Before light, a pair of spring peepers calling down by the boggy corner of the field—ready to spring again, if only it weren’t time to fall.
A squirrel with a walnut in its mouth trots across the porch, right under my chair. Five minutes later, another follows suit. What the hell?
Clouds at dawn change from red to orange to pale yellow, like black gum trees in reverse. A towhee lands in the lilac—a splash of rose.
33°F at dawn. The quarry is loud in the east, and it’s hard to shake the impression that I’m listening to the dull machinery of the sun.
A least flycatcher materializes in the cherry tree, finds three invisible morsels on as many leaves, issues a crisp che-bek! and flies off.
Through the darkness and fog, loud thuds from the black walnut trees that encircle the houses, a slow carpet bombing that goes on for weeks.
First light, and a great-horned owl is calling down in the hollow, the first three notes of each call drowned out by this rabble of a rain.
A song sparrow sings, and suddenly it’s spring again. In the front garden, under browning leaves, the witch hazel dangles spidery blooms.
Overcast and gusty, a day for flying leaves: those that twirl, those that circle, those that flutter, those that tumble, those that sail.
A pileated woodpecker hammers on a dead tree, resonant as it never was in life. I watch ground fog form and dissipate into a clear dawn sky.
The three black locust saplings in the old corral have grown several feet since spring, and now are beginning to yellow from the inside out.
Rising after daybreak, I search out scraps of darkness: a log sunk in the weeds, the rootball of a toppled tree, the sound of grackles.