In the fog and mizzle, swelling yellow-green lilac buds are the brightest thing. A single jet goes over in all the time I sit outside.
fog
February 26, 2020
Thick fog: soundproofing against all but the closest chirps. A nuthatch descends a locust trunk, does an about-face, and scuttles back up.
February 6, 2020
Fog. Trees reduced to their most elemental architecture: an outline, a few brush strokes, nothing. Antagonists to an invisible woodpecker.
January 3, 2020
Light rain. Fog forms up on the ridge and drifts down through the trees like a ghost army, loud with the sounds of traffic.
December 14, 2019
Rain and fog. Gray-green lichen glows on tree trunks in the woods and on every twisted branch of the old crabapple beside the springhouse.
December 13, 2019
Two degrees below freezing, but the rain remains rain. Somewhere above the fog, an airplane’s single propeller.
November 18, 2019
The damp silence inside a cloud, broken only by a pileated woodpecker’s muffled tapping and the distant caw of a crow.
May 13, 2019
Cold rain; the treetops disappearing into cloud. A Carolina wren lands on the railing with a beak full of leaves and a self-important air.
May 1, 2019
Mist. A fragment of blue in the top of an oak that could be a cerulean warbler. From the far ridge, the faint sound of a wood thrush.
April 6, 2019
Robin song echoes through the fog. My neighbor drives past on the tractor. In the wake of its rumble, a towhee’s eponymous call.
March 10, 2019
Crows call through the fog. I open my book to a haiku about crows calling through fog. Having melted a bit, the snow is again a blank page.
February 24, 2019
Late morning and the rain stops, the fog lifts to reveal the same snow-clad mountain as before. The distant sound of an engine being revved.
February 7, 2019
The creek is high and loud. I try to film the fog but it retreats. The sky appears behind the trees as if blinds had just been pulled.
February 5, 2019
Small clouds rise from the decaying snowpack and drift off through the trees. In the yard, a vole’s tunnel system is beginning to emerge.