Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Clear and cool—the first morning of a dry high. A hummingbird visits the orange jewelweed below the porch. A pungent, camphor-like odor makes me think of blossoming yarrow, but I finally decide instead it’s coming from the black locust limbs smashed down in a storm more than a week ago.
Foggy and cool. I sit enjoying the deep stillness, gazing at the wreckage from last night’s storm—two black birches smashed down by the top half of a black locust—and anticipating the chainsaw’s roar.
Bright sun and cedar waxwings whistling in the top of the tall black locust at the woods’ edge, which I see has finally almost leafed out.
Sunrise sky like an illuminated manuscript: that blue, that gold leaf. The red squirrel pokes its head out of its hole in the black locust behind the spinghouse to give everything a resounding scold.
The sky and ground nearly rhyme in their oppressive whiteness. A red squirrel sounds as if he’s having a psychotic break, trying to defend a hollow black locust no doubt stuffed with acorns and walnuts.
Gray skies with a bitter wind. Colored leaves fly past. A pair of gray squirrels meet on the trunk of a black locust and touch snouts.
A warm breeze abuzz with hummingbirds and mosquitoes. A red-eyed vireo sings a few notes and falls silent. Inside a hollow locust tree, something is beating.
Clear at sunrise with an eyelash moon and a deer grazing just inside the woods’ edge. A Cooper’s hawk calls from atop the tallest black locust and flies off to the east.
Cold with a patchwork sky in which some pink appears and fades. The red squirrel scolds from its hole high in a locust as a gray squirrel leaps from birch to birch.
Cold and still. A tall black locust is loud with squirrel claws. Snowflakes as fine as dust begin to fall.
Clear and cold, with a faint patch of frost on the barn roof. Winged tulip tree seeds litter the porch. A red-bellied woodpecker tuts from the top of a tall locust.
A dawn too cold for crickets, and still except where a squirrel makes a branch tremble. From the top of a black locust, a hairy woodpecker’s nasal chirps.
Another cold, clear morning. Robins streaked by the molt contend with blue jays for the best perches in the tops of the tall locusts, answering jeers with tuts.
Cloudy and damp, with long intervals between bird calls. A small woodpecker’s improbably loud rattle from the black locusts sets off a pair of Carolina wrens.