Leaves droop on the elderberry and currant bushes beside the creek—another light frost. April was the cruelest month for trees and shrubs, but May so far hasn’t been much better. On the other hand, a Carolina wren is calling in the yard for the first time in ages.
Breezy and cold, which the sun rising through clouds and half-leafed-out trees does little to abate. But when it emerges fully, I blink into a glisten of raindrops from last night’s showers winking back.
A couple degrees above freezing—the first clear morning in days. The sun blazing through the still mostly leafless oaks illuminates the dust on my glasses.
Damp and overcast for the dawn chorus, which includes the accelerating buzz of a black-throated blue warbler, and a yellow-throated vireo slurring his syllables. The hidden sunrise gets noted, as usual, by a crow.
Foggy and damp. A catbird sings a few bars and falls silent. An hour later, a Baltimore oriole does the same. The field sparrows and towhees keep up their monotonous commentary.
A flaming pink sky subsides into orange, then gray. A scattering of raindrops. A red squirrel follows a chipping sparrow’s rattle with one of its own.
Clear at sunrise, the western ridge brick-red above a meadow full of fog. Sound is out of the east, so field sparrows are answered by quarry truck beepers, and a pileated woodpecker by the grinding of rocks.
In the half-light of dawn, the pale apparition of an opossum at the edge of the woods. It climbs through the lilac, zigzags across the rain-soaked yard and disappears into the crawlspace under my house.
The soft wheezing of a black-and-white warbler alternates with a chipping sparrow’s dry rattle: soundtrack for the flutter of tiny leaves, their Pointillist greens against the gray of incipient rain.
Thin cloud, yet the sun’s still strong enough for leaf-glimmer and the shimmer of spider-silk strands already stringing tree to tree. A gray squirrel chases a red squirrel past my feet.
Warm and a bit humid. As the sun climbs, the brightest shine shifts from mayapple leaves along the creek to the mountain laurel in the woods, shimmering as if unafflicted by any blight.
Overcast and cold and sunrise, with drips and drops that slowly coalesce into rain. My nostrils flare: the thirsty earth is already releasing petrichor. The field sparrows sing on.
Cold, clear, and still, with heavy frost silvering the yard. A red squirrel tries to get its nerve up to run past me, but fails and retreats to the garden, where it sits glaring at a gray squirrel under the lilac.
Three degrees above freezing at sunrise. Small snowflakes drift down from the mostly blue sky and vanish into the greening earth.