The loud rasp of squirrel teeth trying to gain entry to the chambers of a black walnut. Gibbous moon like an eggshell discarded in the sky.
black walnut
The wind persists, and now that the walnut trees are bare I can see the aspens by the marsh, their perpetually agitated crowds yellowing up.
Sunrise turns the western ridge red. A squirrel falls out of a walnut tree and lands with a thump in weeds white with the first frost.
Sun shimmers in the treetops while rain still drips from the roof. A squirrel climbs a walnut tree carrying a walnut, as if in some proverb.
Clear and cold. A squirrel trots into the woods with the green globe of a walnut clenched in its teeth. The oleaginous burble of a wren.
Too dark to identify the small birds darting through the forest canopy. A walnut dislodged by a squirrel thumps hard against the ground.
The trees were full of warblers just before I came out, the resident naturalist informs me. Walnut leaves flutter down like shed feathers.
Yellow walnut leaflets come loose and flutter down in the slightest breeze, infiltrating for a few moments the confederacy of butterflies.
Humid and cool. A nuthatch spirals up rather than down a walnut tree trunk, turning upside-down only when it finds something to eat.
The walnut tree beside the road is in bloom—long green catkins like fringes on antique lampshades. A least skipper flits through the meadow.
Sun! A gray squirrel noshes on black walnut catkins, then drops deliberately to a thin locust branch five feet below and clings, see-sawing.
In the soft light of a half-hidden sun, the old red maple beside the road is ruddy with blossoms. The sound of teeth chiselling a walnut.
Every morning, the carpet of sunlight on the forest floor grows a little larger. The steady rasp of squirrel teeth on black walnut shells.
With the walnuts bare, I can see the aspens again—now a flickering orange, like that tree in the Mabinogion burning without being consumed.