Showers intermittent as stragglers in a race. This morning’s porch may stretch into the afternoon, as long as my claps keep up with the mosquitoes.
A mosquito sings her dark need into my ear. Day advances like a slow machine of squeaking towhees and whirring wrens.
Cloudy, but the clouds are paper-thin, so the Carolina wren bobbing on a branch casts a thin shadow.
Cool, humid and overcast. A pair of hummingbirds sit side by side on a bare twig, the male rising and hovering behind the female every few seconds to copulate with a decorousness one might not have expected from such fierce birds.
An orange moon gone slightly flat hangs in the southwest at dawn. An eight-point buck grazes under the old lilac.
My three-year-old tulip tree has extended one last, jaunty new leaf for the season. How tall it has grown on this summer’s thunderstorms! Not to mention all the extra CO2 in the air.
Sun glimmering through thin, high clouds. The distant rumble of a train. In the long grass, each drop of dew begins to shine.
Rising after the sun, I watch it illuminate section by section the complex structure of a funnel spider web.
Clear and cool. A migrant wood thrush calls softly at first light. It’s very still. Then the wrens wake up.
White sky with distant crows. The stiltgrass in the meadow is still lying low after a thunderstorm yesterday at dusk.
Another cool, humid morning. The hearty laughter of a pileated woodpecker interrupts my scrolling.
A wood thrush is singing in the distance. I shoo away the mosquito singing in my ear to listen.
Rising late, I find the sun already spread out on the leaves like piecemeal linen, shining white, and the forest floor striped with shadows.
Sunrise thunderstorm: the sky darkening just when you least expect it, then the downpour and all the leaves of grass nodding like headbangers as the thunder booms.