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.
fog
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.
Foggy and cool, the spring still loud with yesterday’s rain. A murmur of voices from the other house—a radio tuned to the news. Somewhere up in the woods, a tree crashes down.
A mourning dove calls from out of the fog, high-pitched and hesitant, as if just learning how to sing. A flower fly is licking my laptop where I rest my wrist.
Thin fog forms as the rising sun begins warming the humid air and rain-soaked vegetation. I look for the half moon, still high overhead, in a large patch of blue.
Low clouds merging into fog. In the front garden, several dozen bergamots are in bloom, rain dripping from their purple locks. A very sodden chipmunk runs past my feet.
Foggy and cool. I sit enjoying the deep stillness, gazing at the wreckage from last night’s storm—two black birches smashed down by the top half of a black locust—and anticipating the chainsaw’s roar.
Foggy and damp. A catbird sings a few bars and falls silent. An hour later, a Baltimore oriole does the same. The field sparrows and towhees keep up their monotonous commentary.
Clear at sunrise, the western ridge brick-red above a meadow full of fog. Sound is out of the east, so field sparrows are answered by quarry truck beepers, and a pileated woodpecker by the grinding of rocks.
Thick fog at dawn, full of robin song and phoebe calls. Sunrise is signalled by little more than the growing thunder of pileated woodpeckers.
Foggy and cool. The distant lowing of a cow. In the currant bushes straddling the stream, a house finch burbles.
Thick fog alive with robin and red-winged blackbird song. The spring gurgles under the yard. The wingbeats of a crow pass overhead.
Foggy and warm. Two nuthatches at the woods’ edge tangle in mid-air, tumbling a dozen feet before retreating to separate tree trunks. Near the top of the big tulip tree, a gray squirrel is leaping from limb to limb.
A mid-morning break in the rain. A red-winged blackbird calls once as the fog retreats to the ridgetop. Robins tut-tut. An altercation breaks out among the red-bellied woodpeckers.