Moon above, mist below, and the treetops shot with sun. Jays call back and forth, acorns filling the pouches in their throats.
Sitting by the front door to enjoy the moon, I’m startled by a rabbit running between my feet in her eagerness to graze. Five minutes later she runs back to evade a weasel loping down the road. Orion emerges from the trees.
A moon gone slightly flat hangs in the big walnut trees over my mother’s house, which periodically release their ordnance onto the roof with a bang.
A clearing sky. with traffic sound out of the east. Six geese coming flapping low over the trees, honking like lost Volvos.
Every morning more yellow in the woods. What’s happening while we sleep? An unseen full moon. Migrant thrushes descending through the clouds at dawn.
Clear and cold, with sound out of the east: the rumble and squeal of a slow freight train. Jays jeer. A wren puts the kettle on.
An hour past sunrise and the sky is brightening. A red-bellied woodpecker makes anxious chirps, prompting a flicker to respond. A tree drops a dead limb into last year’s leaves.
Rain: on the roofs drumming, in the meadow a whisper and in the forest a quiet roar. It lasts for hours. The cold creeps under my coat.
A few minutes before sunrise, a crack followed by a crash from just inside the woods. I delude myself that I can detect the type of tree: sounds like a red maple, I’d say. So unlike the way they come into the world—miniature claws already red with autumn.
Cold wind and rain, belied by all the cheerful yellow starting to move from the goldenrod up into the trees at the woods’ edge.
Overcast and still, with a low rumble of traffic from the east. In the half-light, a deer’s ear pivots among the goldenrod.
Cool but not quite as clear, with a thin, high scrim of clouds and the incessant beeping of quarry trucks, to which a migrant phoebe briefly responds.
Dawn: the red thread of a contrail fraying as it fades. Fog rises from the goldenrod, erasing the faint dot that must’ve been Mercury.
Clearing enough by 8:00 for the sun to nest in the treetops. Highway noise subsides, giving way to the knocks and clatter of falling walnuts and acorns, the scold-calls of chipmunks, the jeers of jays.