Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Breezy and cool with a clearing sky. The chipmunk who lives in my front garden runs between my feet to the end of the porch, takes fright at something there, and runs back. Raspberries in the yard like bruised thumbs are slowly turning from red to black.
Every morning, more soapwort blossoms, and the raspberry canes are stretching into new territory. A harvestman stalks across my gray wasteland of a porch.
Clear and cool. A deer snorts alarm up in the woods. A female cardinal picks a black raspberry on her way through my yard.
Clear and still. A flicker’s eponymous chant from the sunlit crown of a black locust. The black raspberries in my yard are already blood-red.
From under the house, rabbit tracks encircling a half-eaten raspberry cane, raccoon tracks going straight to the stream—muddy on the return.
A catbird darts into the weeds. I stand up to look: it’s gobbling down the first ripe raspberries. The buzz of a hummingbird at the beebalm.
In the dim light of a misty morning, rain-slick surfaces glow: green lichens, purple raspberry canes, the yellow blades of foxtail millet.