Cold rain. The wind from a distant storm stirs the bright green, half-grown walnut leaves, moving on into the darker greens of the forest.
black walnut
Overcast and damp, with the intense green of new leaves everywhere. Two doves moan in different keys. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks down the road out of sight.
Clear and still with frost in the yard and the gibbous moon caught in the treetops like a deflated balloon. A brown creeper sprials up a walnut tree. The sun comes up.
Rain easing off along with the dawn chorus. The sky brightens, and a brown creeper on the walnut tree beside the road bursts into song.
The slow fall of small snowflakes never quite stops. A squirrel with a half a tail bounds past, carrying his freshy disinterred breakfast: a black lump of frozen walnut.
Not far below freezing. The sun appears through a keyhole in the clouds. A gray squirrel reaches into the snow and extracts a black walnut.
Rain zebra-striped with snow; the woods more wet than white. A sodden squirrel trots down the road with a black walnut between her teeth.
We’re in the clouds. They drum on the roofs and echo with bird calls. A dead walnut branch, scaley with lichen, lies in the road like a landed fish.
Orange light seeps down the western ridge. The half moon high overhead has been abandoned by its entourage of stars. A crow sits in a newly bare walnut tree, yelling.
Clear and cold. The red squirrel I’ve been hearing scold finally appears, racing up a bare walnut tree just as a deer hunter drags the first kill of the season out of the woods.
The rain goes on and on for hours. I watch a drenched squirrel at the end of a branch lose his grip on a walnut. A small brown moth circles my face.
Clear and still, except for the periodic crashing down of a walnut, each one followed by a small entourage of yellow leaves. The sun clears the ridge and the trees reclaim their shadows.
Heavily overcast and still—a perfect morning to watch walnut leaves fall: the flutterers, the gliders, the tumblers, the spirallers, and the rare ones that float straight down.
Another cool, clear, still morning. The bang of a walnut on a metal roof. A chipmunk’s metronome.