Sun rising through an increasingly threadbare forest canopy of mellow reds and yellows, all converging on brown: oaks in November. A hunter walks out of the woods in camouflage gray.
fall foliage
Contrails thicken into clouds between dwindling patches of pastel blue, but there’s still enough sun to set the crown of the big scarlet oak aglow. A few distant cries of geese off to the north are submerged in Carolina wren song.
Clouds sinking into the trees at daybreak. A thin, high jumble of notes from a brown creeper. It feels and even sounds like rain, but that’s just the dry tick of leaves falling into leaves.
Sun glowing through thin clouds—not just whiter, brighter, as a bygone ad for laundry soap once put it. The nasal call of a nuthatch. A slight breath of wind and a black birch at the woods’ edge divests itself of another hundred leaves.
Yellow leaves falling in the fog. A chipmunk runs onto the porch, sees me and stops short, with a walnut larger than its head between its teeth.
Warm and breezy at sunrise. One katydid is still calling, as if reluctant to see the end of what could be the katydids’ last big party night of the year. Two yellow walnut leaves land on my laptop.
Soft sunlight through high atmospheric haze. Dew drips from the roof. The forest glows orange and yellow as spring peepers call from the leaf litter.
Sun through thin clouds at mid-morning. A suppressed burble of wren-song from the woods’ edge. Yellow leaves festoon the reddening stiltgrass in the yard.
The coldest morning of the autumn so far, but no frost. Pileated woodpeckers yammer in the distance as the sun climbs through golden leaves toward the moon’s thin grin.
More clouds than sun, with walnut trees undressing in the wind, and the leaves on the porch turning over like restless sleepers. The periodic bang of a walnut landing on the back roof is loud as a gunshot.
Sunny and still at mid-morning, with backlit leaves at the woods’ edge looking even yellower than they are. The throb of a distant engine. Squirrel teeth chiseling open a walnut. A common yellowthroat pipes up.
Overcast and still. The bracken in the yard has all turned brown and the stillgrass is reddening, revealing the dark green leaves of a new volunteer spicebush.
A gloomy morning, except for the wren: the dull mechanical songs of the quarry, the low cloud ceiling, the cold breath of autumn making leaves tremble on their stems.
Off and on rain and the sporadic crashes of falling walnuts. I watch a yellow tulip tree leaf tumbling down, end over end, the air slipping through its four Mickey Mouse fingers.