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.
black walnut
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.
Mist dissipating into blue. The walnut trees on the north side of the house are now nearly bare, even as the one on the south side is still more green than yellow. The sun briefly blazes through a new hole in the hillside canopy.
Cloudy at sunrise, the sky takes its time clearing off. A walnut splats down on the driveway, trailed by a fluttery entourage of yellow leaves.
Rain in widely scattered drops, a light seasoning over everything. It intensifies; a half-molted walnut tree begins leafleting the yard. It tapers off. A squirrel chisels open a nut.
Cloudy and cool. The shed skin of a rat snake has blown off the back roof and dangles in the branches of a walnut. In the next tree over, a gray squirrel walks to the end of a limb, sniffing each walnut, and picks the one at the very end.
Cloudy and cool with a 100% chance of falling walnuts—though admittedly, some are being dropped by squirrels. A red-bellied woodpecker keeps up an anxious commentry.
Partly cloudy and cool at sunrise, with more yellow and orange leaves than I’ve ever seen this early in the fall: not just walnut and black gum but black birch, tulip poplar, and even a few maples, just as our 30 acres of goldenrod approach their peak of bloom. I’m reminded of the Chinese name for San Francisco: old gold mountain.