Has anyone ever exclaimed, “The dock is in bloom!”? Fuzzy green spires with a hint of orange, surrounded by bobbing candelabras of brome.
Overcast and humid. A bracken frond beside the road has turned yellow as a Yield sign. A raincrow calls over and over at the woods’ edge.
Through every opening in the wall of woods, white mounds glow in the dim light: mountain laurel at its peak of bloom, the best in years.
Sun in the treetops where a catbird improvises. From the lilac, the song of a towhee, incorporated seconds later into the catbird’s stream.
Clear, 54°F. Squirrels leap through the dripping branches, chase each other up and down trunks. A distant traffic noise of cicadas.
The evening primroses I got from the Amish are in bloom: x-shaped stigmas extended like hands from the centers of large, plain faces.
In a hurry this morning, I go over to the garden, looking for anything of interest. Crickets. An old man with a stick comes down the road.
The weird weAHHHHHHHHHHHoh calls of 17-year cicadas join the morning chorus for the first time. A male scarlet tanager flashes past my feet.
The tulip poplar at the edge of the woods is in its glory, covered with yellow lotus-shaped blooms like a mandala emptied of its buddhas.
I prop my feet up on the rail,…
I prop my feet up on the rail, and within seconds, a blowfly lands on the toe of my left sandal and a syrphid fly on my right. It’s summer.
Tropical humidity. A tent caterpillar clings to the edge of my warped old end table like the last unrotted section of a Victorian fringe.
A hummingbird lands on the upturned tip of a dead elm branch; the branch doesn’t move a hair. The first open peony lies on its side.
Foggy morning. A short-lived bright period brings a faint sound of traffic from I-99. I hear the hummingbird’s small motor in the garden.
Two squirrels slowly circle the trunk of a walnut tree, gray against gray, frenetic tails sending Morse messages through the heartwood.