Sun through thin clouds. A female cardinal foraging under the lilac picks up a twig, examines it, and sets it down again. Through the lilac limbs I spot the long legs of a deer picking her way across the road bank.
lilac
Overcast and cool. I look up from my book to see a hummingbird flying aggressively back and forth a foot away from a gnatcatcher perched in the lilac, who seems unimpressed.
In the half-light of dawn, the pale apparition of an opossum at the edge of the woods. It climbs through the lilac, zigzags across the rain-soaked yard and disappears into the crawlspace under my house.
Cold, clear, and still, with heavy frost silvering the yard. A red squirrel tries to get its nerve up to run past me, but fails and retreats to the garden, where it sits glaring at a gray squirrel under the lilac.
Under gray skies, the old lilac is once again beginning to green up. The zig-zag flight of a phoebe gleaning breakfast out of thin air.
Sun finds the spokes of miniature daffodils opening beside the disease-ravaged lilac. I pull my hat-brim down to watch all the early insects already plying the cold spring air.
In thick fog, the bright flesh of lilac and tulip tree limbs barked by squirrels for their nests. The last few patches of snow look as bedraggled as old bandages.
Damp, overcast and quiet. The sprawling old white lilac battling a blight is once again flowering, with a dozen half-sized clusters at the ends of ravaged limbs looking less like white flags than signal fires: a fight to the death.
The slow creak of a field cricket like a rusty winch for the sunrise. In the dying lilac I spot new mile-a-minute vines.
Breezy and cool. The white lilac, with at least 75% of its leaves dead from disease, is bizarrely in blossom again, with at least five full-sized clusters, white as flags signalling surrender.
Half a moon alone in the sky. A silent catbird flies into the half-dead lilac. Off through the forest, blinding fragments of the sun.
Overcast and cool, with sound out of the east: instead of the dull roar of interstate traffic, the dull roar of the quarry. I take stock of the dying: spicebush, lilac and currant bushes all blighted by nematodes, mildew or rust. The sun makes a bleary appearance.
Fog lingering into mid-morning. The sprawling lilac at the far edge of the yard is now more than half-brown with leaf-spot disease, brought on by this endless rainy season. The mullein stalk still follows its yellow flowers into the sky.
A rainy morning with little actual rain. The red squirrel scolds and chatters from the springhouse. A hint of scent wafts around the house from the old purple lilac.