An autumnal sunrise, with crisp air and the creek full of voices, bracken browning in the yard, and the walnut leaves experimenting with carotenoids.
black walnut
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.
Overcast and still. A yellow walnut leaflet flutters down onto the fallen trunk of my favorite climbing tree when I was a kid.
Cool with murky, cloud-mediated sunlight. A hummingbird perches on a walnut branch for thirty seconds, head swiveling all about.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Half moon high overhead at 5:00, half-illuminating the ground fog and darkening the shadows into which walnuts thud down.
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.
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.
43F/6C an hour after sunrise. Not a cloud in the sky. Black walnuts crash down at random intervals.
Crystal-clear and cold: autumn’s first visit. A breeze sorting through the walnut leaves, a few of which are already yellow.