Gray and still. A robin sings softly for a change. Two whitetails below my mother’s back porch bound up the hillside and out of sight.
clouds
March 26, 2023
Robins have joined the dawn chorus to dramatic effect; the hollow’s echo chamber throbs with birdsong. The first vulture of the day soars past a pink-bellied cloud.
March 19, 2023
A dozen dead leaves circle the yard as the clouds’ bellies turn orange. A phoebe calls once, sotto voce, from a branch above the creek.
March 18, 2023
The sun guttering below a lid of utility-gray cloud illuminates a small flotilla of snowflakes. It’s quiet apart from one, highly excited wren.
March 16, 2023
Sunrise into slow-moving cirrus; the light dulls like the eyes of a dying fish. In the windless calm, the long gargle of an 18-wheeler descending an exit.
March 11, 2023
As above, so below—the ground the same white as the cloud ceiling. My thick hat excludes all but the sound of wind and birds and a train horn’s dissonant chord.
March 8, 2023
Moon low in the west, as bright as a searchlight. Two silent crows fly over the house. The clouds’ bellies begin to glow.
March 6, 2023
Cold and still, with an almost-mackerel sky that Vs of tundra swans keep crossing—their clarinet notes, their breast feathers golden with sunrise.
March 5, 2023
Clouds beginning to clear by 8:00. A gray squirrel with a black walnut between her teeth is followed by three others through the treetops.
March 3, 2023
With a storm on the way, the sun is a bright smear in a field of white. Still the normal early-spring soundtrack: cardinal, nuthatch, junco, crow, plane, train…
March 2, 2023
The mid-morning sun in the forecast comes with a scrim of cloud, a breeze, and a raven on the ridgetop going bonk…bonk…bonk…
March 1, 2023
Fast-moving, yellow-bellied clouds stream up from the southeast, clearing to reveal a long bow of tundra swans arrowing north.
February 24, 2023
Overcast with bright openings and the white noise of wind, raising the dead leaves once again, making them fly.
February 22, 2023
Just enough thinning of clouds for a classic, red-in-the-morning wash of mauve in the east, where quarry trucks are loud with their first loads.