Thin clouds turn livid for the sunrise. A chickadee twitters. Two minutes later, we’re back to gloom.
clouds
October 22, 2023
After a windy night, the forest is looking decidedly threadbare in its coat of many colors, illuminated each time the sun finds a hole in the clouds.
October 7, 2023
Rain clouds moving out by mid-morning, when blue sky appears, revealing a higher layer of cirrus moving west while shreds of cumulus keep flying east.
October 6, 2023
Heavily overcast—what the weather app calls “light rain”—with a crow yelling in the distance and a yellow-bellied sapsucker mewing like a kitten.
September 22, 2023
Cool but not quite as clear, with a thin, high scrim of clouds and the incessant beeping of quarry trucks, to which a migrant phoebe briefly responds.
September 17, 2023
Gray sky ten minutes after a flaming sunrise. A phoebe calls for old times’ sake. Quarry trucks rumble through the gap.
September 13, 2023
Cool and quiet, once all the newly arrived night travelers have stopped chirping. Patches of blue sky appear. A goldfinch twitters half-heartedly.
August 28, 2023
Gray rain clouds thickening towards 8:00. It’s very still; long moments go by without a single bird call. A beetle finds its way to the butterfly weed.
August 23, 2023
Cold at dawn, with the lightest of breezes bringing sounds from the east—mostly the limestone quarry’s dull roar. A screech owl trills. The clouds go pink.
August 21, 2023
Sun glimmering in a sky so light blue as to appear white. The Carolina wren’s motor sounds as if it’s running out of gas. Mosquitoes begin to circle.
August 17, 2023
Sunrise filling every cloud’s belly with pink as the Carolina wren trills over and over—once for each cloud, it seems.
August 8, 2023
Drizzle in the wind even as the sky brightens. Small patches of blue appear and disappear. A yellow leaf spirals down into the yard.
August 5, 2023
Cloudy, but the clouds are paper-thin, so the Carolina wren bobbing on a branch casts a thin shadow.
July 29, 2023
White sky with distant crows. The stiltgrass in the meadow is still lying low after a thunderstorm yesterday at dusk.