Sun rising into clouds. The mob of wild garlic heads in the meadow are beginning to shed their white hoods.
clouds
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.
Partly cloudy and cool. A large garter snake emerges from the stone wall and curls up on a sunny corner of the porch.
In the flat light of a cloudy morning, bracken fronds glow like the sun-bleached rib cages of seraphim—skeletons gone rococo.
Clear sky, sun in the treetops… “Cloudy conditions will continue all day,” my phone admonishes. The big tulip tree releases a yellow leaf.
Some unscheduled sunshine from a fissure in the clouds, while the breeze whispers of distant storms. I scratch a new itch to redness.
Overcast at sunrise. The woodpeckers’ percussive breakfasts. A mosquito wanders over my propped-up feet.
I watch a new squirrel figure out the tree-to-tree route out of the woods, backtracking, sizing things up. The sun goes in.
The sun behind a nearly motionless cloud casts a pair of crepuscular rays like vast, dark wings. A hen turkey stalks into the woods.
A deer grazes a few feet away; I can hear blades of grass tearing. The sun almost breaks through a thin spot in the clouds.
Windy and cool. The pale undersides of leaves turning in unison like shoals of fish. A robin and a tanager trading off.
When the clouds move off, an orbweaver’s web appears in the corner of a porch balustrade, shimmering as it pulses in the breeze.
Just past sunrise, a clearing wind. I look up from the Eastern Europe of my book to flame-bellied clouds, the forest all astir.
A planetary conjunction slowly infiltrated by cirrus stained the color of dawn. A barred owl calls and a wild turkey answers.