Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Cool and clear. Sunlight pours through a hole in the forest canopy into the crown of a black walnut tree, erasing the difference between green and yellow leaves. A mourning dove calls from the woods’ edge—not the full song, just a kind of two-syllable Wow.
A yellow walnut leaf spins as it falls, just ahead of the rain—another passing shower. Blades of grass tremble as they’re struck. The Carolina wren keeps singing up by the garage.
Overcast and cool. Here and there, black walnut leaves are beginning to yellow. A deer foraging at the woods’ edge breaks into a trot to try to escape her flies.
Breezy and cool, with the smell of smoke a bit diminished. The patter of rain. Three yellow walnut leaves flutter to the ground together. A rumble of thunder.
Out early to catch the coolness, such as it is. Sunlight filtered by atmospheric murk. A breeze riffling the walnut leaves. Ovenbirds, towhees and red-eyed vireos once again making their small claims.
Raininess without much actual raining. The low motor of a hummingbird somewhere in the garden. An aborted black walnut crashes down on the back roof.
Equinox. I make it out onto the porch just as the sun peeks over the ridge. Phoebes are calling. From the top of a walnut tree, the brown-headed cowbird’s liquid lisp.
Flurries starting in fifteen minutes, says the weather app, and fifteen minutees later the air is full of flakes wandering this way and that, every bit as sentient as AI bots. By the time they stop half an hour later, I’m a snowman. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks right under my chair.
Clear and still. A squirrel crouched in the lowest crotch of the closest black walnut tree works on her breakfast walnut, tail arched back into a headdress as spiky as the rising sun that sets it aglow.
A hole in the clouds at dawn fails to hold the whole full moon—a brief, bright searchlight. Later, at sunrise, a chorus of chiselers as gray squirrels work on their black walnuts.
Overcast and still. A squirrel running across the road drops the frozen walnut in her teeth, and it rolls along by itself for a few feet. Up on the ridge, a tree pops from the cold.
A dawn bright with snowlight, the storm a kind of theater in which the play consists of a thin white curtain falling and falling. As the temperature inches up, the flakes begin to fatten. A squirrel dashes to the end of a limb on its snow-free underside to pluck one of the last unfallen black walnuts.
Clouds gather in the east, glowing brightly as they smother the sun. A west-bound freight rumbles through the gap. Bits of walnut shell rain down from a squirrel’s breakfast.
Clear and very quiet at dawn. Some scattered towhee tweets. The thump of a walnut dropped by a half-awake squirrel.