A pause between showers. The thud of a walnut dropped by a squirrel. A housefly circles the porch. The rain starts back up.
black walnut
August 10, 2024
An autumnal sunrise, with crisp air and the creek full of voices, bracken browning in the yard, and the walnut leaves experimenting with carotenoids.
August 2, 2024
Darkness falls at 7:50 a.m. as a thunderstorm rumbles in. The yellow walnut leaves fluttering lazily down seem oddly unaffected by sudden sheets of rain.
July 24, 2024
Overcast and still. A yellow walnut leaflet flutters down onto the fallen trunk of my favorite climbing tree when I was a kid.
July 13, 2024
Cool with murky, cloud-mediated sunlight. A hummingbird perches on a walnut branch for thirty seconds, head swiveling all about.
May 28, 2024
Breezy and cool—a distinctly autumnal feel, belied by the black walnut trees’ young leaves, not yet full size, light green against the darker forest behind them. My brother the birder hurries past, eyes darting all about.
March 28, 2024
A band of salmon-colored cloud above the horizon half an hour past sunrise. From the top branch of a walnut tree, a brown-headed cowbird sings his single, complex note.
March 20, 2024
Heavily overcast at mid-morning. I watch a squirrel surveying the yard from atop a stump, then loping over and retrieving a husked walnut from a tuft of grass.
January 18, 2024
A gray squirrel on a gray morning, having tunneled through snow and frozen earth to disinter a black walnut, squats on a dead limb of a dead maple, gnawing at the rock-hard shell.
December 26, 2023
Rain tapering into mist and drizzle. A squirrel finds a black walnut next to the road, swiftly de-husks it and carries it away. The sky brightens. A goldfinch lisps a single note.
October 4, 2023
Half moon high overhead at 5:00, half-illuminating the ground fog and darkening the shadows into which walnuts thud down.
October 1, 2023
A moon gone slightly flat hangs in the big walnut trees over my mother’s house, which periodically release their ordnance onto the roof with a bang.
September 20, 2023
Clearing enough by 8:00 for the sun to nest in the treetops. Highway noise subsides, giving way to the knocks and clatter of falling walnuts and acorns, the scold-calls of chipmunks, the jeers of jays.
September 15, 2023
43F/6C an hour after sunrise. Not a cloud in the sky. Black walnuts crash down at random intervals.