Time-change day. It’s cold and very still. A lone goose flies past the half moon, honking.
Canada geese
Contrails thicken into clouds between dwindling patches of pastel blue, but there’s still enough sun to set the crown of the big scarlet oak aglow. A few distant cries of geese off to the north are submerged in Carolina wren song.
With most of the forest understorey bare, one can see so much more through the trees: a full moon setting in the west, a flock of geese, the white tail of a deer retreating like a ghost into the dark mountain laurel bushes.
Clear but not as cold. The shadows of three silent, low-flying geese cross the porch as a larger flock to the south provides the soundtrack of goose music.
Clear and cold. The bird app identifies singers I cannot hear: ruby-crowned kinglet, American goldfinch, Canada goose. Ten minutes later, I do hear another lone goose go over, a slight note of panic in its honks.
Cool and nearly clear, save for a couple scraps of cloud to catch the sunrise and color up like old leaves. The distant fluting of geese is just audible over the whine of Monday morning traffic.
A white sky except where the sun blazes, whiter than white. A helicopter’s loud, bladed flower. In its wake, the scattered cries of geese.
Heavily overcast and loud with train and traffic noise. Two geese fly over the house without making a sound.
Gloomy and still. The faint rattle of something like rain, that soon turns into something like snow and peters out. A distant honking of geese.
Canada geese, a screech owl, some crows, and the inevitable wren sing in the sunrise, the western ridge turning red under a flat-tire moon.
Too cold for all but one hardy field cricket. In the meadow, the half-grown twin fawns have a go at their mother’s milk, one on each side. A small flock of geese go over, bugling.
A gray-wool sky, periodically crossed by Vs of geese. The snowpack has shrunk to an archipelago of white ice. A neighbor’s chicken is crowing over her latest creation.
A sky of pastel colors occasionally graced by a bleary sun. Strings of non-migrant, local Canada geese fly low over the trees, restless, their cries still full of elsewhere.
Contrails fading to white after sunrise—toppled columns from a ruined temple. Three bugle notes from a lone goose. The dull roar of traffic.