Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Overcast and cool. When I tire of feeding myself to the mosquitoes, I don a bug hat and go into the yard with my phone to identify whatever has been skeletonizing trees and shrubs: angle-lined prominent moth caterpillars on the bigtooth aspen, pinstriped in green but too hairy to be extra twigs, and dogwood sawfly larvae on the silky dogwoods, curled into fat white moons.
Overcast and cool. The aspen sapling in my yard is wound around with bindweed, I notice, and I spend a few minutes removing it—unwinding, as it were. The leaves tremble as only an aspen can do.
After a downpour at dawn, the sky brightens, then darkens again. The aspen and tulip tree saplings in my yard take turns trembling in the breeze. The tanager sings.
Out early for the moon and whippoorwill, and soon enough the only blue sky we’re likely to see all day. Everything drips. Half-open aspen leaves hang like gray dishrags from the sapling in the yard.
In the cool stillness, the snap of a phoebe’s bill on some unwary insect. The four-foot-tall aspen beside the driveway bends under the bird’s weight as he perches on its spindly tip.
A clearing wind. The wood thrush comes into the yard to sing as blue sky appears. The aspen I planted last year is already big enough to mime applause.