Cool and clear except for wisps of shredded contrails. Sound is out of the east: rumble of a train, the quarry’s grind.
clouds
August 30, 2022
Out before sunrise to watch a thunderstorm that never appears. The clouds half-clear. Squirrels go about their business.
August 26, 2022
At 8:15 the sun almost comes out. Half an hour later, it’s still almost out. My faint shadow gives up after the feet.
August 23, 2022
Clouds gravid with rain at sunrise. A wood thrush calls quietly. In the top of the tallest oak, a squirrel’s silhouette begins its descent.
August 20, 2022
Sun through a scrim of cloud. The first white snakeroot is in bloom. A Linne’s cicada rattles like a bad engine.
August 14, 2022
The third autumnal morning in a row, with clouds introducing a more melancholy note: nesting time is over, the sky road calls…
August 10, 2022
Milk-white sky and the white noise of tree crickets. A pileated woodpecker cackles to herself at the top of a tall locust.
August 1, 2022
Overcast at sunrise. A meadowhawk dragonfly zips back and forth, inches above the rain-soaked vegetation.
July 31, 2022
Lightly overcast and cool. A molting warbler skulks in the old lilac, foraging for breakfast on the undersides of leaves.
July 28, 2022
Cool, overcast, and humid. A breeze brings the smell of ozone and a hush of rain finishing its journey down from the trees.
July 27, 2022
Sun rising into clouds. The mob of wild garlic heads in the meadow are beginning to shed their white hoods.
July 16, 2022
Heavily overcast; on the weather app, it’s raining. The sky lightens; on the weather app, bright sunshine. From Mom’s house, the measured tones of Morning Edition.
July 14, 2022
Partly cloudy and cool. A large garter snake emerges from the stone wall and curls up on a sunny corner of the porch.
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.