Sun in the top of the tall tulip poplar—yellow crowning yellow. The last nighttime cricket falls silent. Off through the thinning woods, new chinks of sky.
crickets
8/19/2024
Light rain at sunrise, drumming on the porch roof—not enough to still the crickets or keep the hummingbird from her appointed rounds.
8/6/2024
Nearly silent at sunrise, except for the field crickets playing their only hit: so much autumn and melancholy in that raspy metronome.
7/30/2024
A white sky with a bright gash of sun. The red-eyed vireo falls silent, leaving only two crickets, one who chirps and one who trills. Then, inevitably, the wren.
7/23/2024
Tree crickets rather than birdsong: it feels like late summer already. But after yesterday’s soaking rain, leaves no longer droop. I can smell the earth.
8/31/2023
The full moon sits on the horizon, serenaded by cold crickets. Overhead, the Pleiades wink out one by one, leaving Jupiter alone in the crown of a locust.
10/25/2022
Overcast with fog that thins out for the purported sunrise. It’s warm enough that one tree cricket trills in the herb garden.
8/10/2022
Milk-white sky and the white noise of tree crickets. A pileated woodpecker cackles to herself at the top of a tall locust.
9/23/2021
The first full day of astronomical autumn dawns to downpour. A cricket in the garden scrapes out a last few, scattered notes.
9/1/2021
Rain thickens toward mid-morning as the ex-hurricane moves through. One cricket still calls from the shelter of peony leaves.
8/23/2021
The meadow and its crickets. The full moon emerges from the clouds upside-down in every drop of dew.
8/18/2021
Rain and warblers. An earth-shaking blast from the quarry two miles away. The soft susurrus of tree crickets.
9/16/2020
Sun grown vague with haze from the burning of the west. The drone note of tree crickets, so much more introspective than cicadas.
9/27/2018
Overcast and cool. Birds only call at intervals now. Crickets’ chirps are as small and repetitive as the blossoms on the white heath aster.