Cold and still, with yesterday’s rain still dripping from the trees, and fog shot through with sunlight rising into blue. Scattered chirps give little indication of the hordes of migrants brought in by the front.
fog
Fog that lasts for hours, blurring the lines between night and day, and between sky and ground for night-flying migrants now foraging all along the woods’ edge—a cloud full of food.
8:00 o’clock church bells and the fog has nearly all lifted. A nuthatch calls down by the stream, soon joined by chickadees. From my mother’s house, the measured voices of NPR.
Partly cloudy and cool at sunrise, with 97% humidity and very little noise from—I’m guessing—valleys full of fog. A single-engine plane fades into the distance.
Cool and very humid. A thin cloud forms in the treetops, shot through with sun. A screech owl trills.
Cool and clear. A pair of bindweed blossoms have opened on a fence post like microwave transmitters. A tiny patch of fog shelters from the sun in the lowest part of the meadow.
Mist rising from the meadow. In the woods, one moss-covered bole of a black birch is illuminated by a random shaft of sun.
The hollow is full of fog with nothing but blue sky above it—a green bowl of birdsong and parts unknown. The sun like a bright spider stretching and retracting her legs.
Fog lifts to reveal blue sky, the sun in the treetops. A scarlet tanager hurtles past the porch with a second in close pursuit. The morning’s first itch prickles the back of my hand.
Rain and fog shut out all sounds from the valley; a gobbling turkey and a pair of pileated woodpeckers are the loudest things. A titmouse sheltering in the lilac shakes the rain from his wings.
A green fog of leaves in fog. A pileated woodpecker’s thunderous drum finds no echo.
Gloomy sunrise, with a cloud snagged on the treetops, leaking rain. A titmouse takes advantage of a lull in the chorus to hype his own claim. A tanager’s plucked string.
Fog at dawn, raucous with the calls of a whip-poor-will staking his claim to the woods’ edge, close enough that I can hear him clear his throat.
Thick fog brightening in the east. Over the roar of the creek, a phoebe’s small, inexhaustible engine.