A few clouds at sunrise. Goldfinches chatter over the rap battles of ovenbirds and vireos. Bracken leaves are still opening in the yard—feathers on feathers.
bracken
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.
July 26, 2024
Crystal-clear and cold. A mourning dove calls from the woods’ edge. A small patch of sun appears among the bracken, making a drought-struck frond twice as yellow.
July 10, 2024
Here and there, the bracken in my yard is beginning to turn yellow. A hummingbird buzzes past, pausing to inspect several garlic heads.
August 12, 2023
Another brief shower as the sun almost breaks through. A wood pewee answers his own question. I count the yellowing bracken fronds in my yard.
June 4, 2023
Raininess without rain. The peonies remain unbowed. Half-grown bracken fronds in my thin-soiled yard are already turning yellow.
May 23, 2023
Humid but blessedly cool; the air’s alive with birdsong and slow-moving insects. Rabbits chase and graze among half-grown bracken.
August 15, 2022
Drizzle thickening now and then into proper rain. The bracken in my yard glows in all the colors of decline and fall.
July 8, 2022
In the flat light of a cloudy morning, bracken fronds glow like the sun-bleached rib cages of seraphim—skeletons gone rococo.
June 11, 2022
Writing on the porch for a while, I am confronted, every time I look up, by three bracken fronds in my yard that have already turned yellow, like needlessly complex skeletons of fish.
September 9, 2021
Autumn comes from the ground up: stiltgrass stems reddening as bracken fronds bronze, while funnel spiderwebs snag the fog.
July 28, 2021
This year for the first time deer have not eaten all the bracken in my yard. One frond is already yellowing like the skeleton of some unlikely fish.
June 15, 2020
A spicebush swallowtail careens through the yard, where bracken fronds nod in three directions. A downy woodpecker upside-down on a limb.
June 2, 2020
Light rain. The bracken in the yard have replaced the fronds they lost in the late frost, but they have a hurried, bunched appearance.