Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
The streak of a meteor below the crescent moon doesn’t reach the thin ground fog. I watch the stars fade until only Rigel remains—Orion’s left foot. It slips from view fifteen minutes before sunrise. A minute later, the first mosquito whines in my ear.
Moonlit dawn. A screech owl quavers, prompting a barred owl to hoot. As light builds in the east, a whippoorwill begins to shriek.
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.
Out early for the moon and whippoorwill, and soon enough the only blue sky we’re likely to see all day. Everything drips. Half-open aspen leaves hang like gray dishrags from the sapling in the yard.
A crescent moon at dawn through trees on the cusp of leaf-out—possibly my last such view until October. It remains the only scrap of white in the sky as the sun’s first gleam tops the ridge.
Brick-red clouds barely move as a relentless wind rummages through the trees and shrubs on the ridgeside. A thin slice of moon gets lost among tossing limbs.
We may have lost an hour from our phones, but at least the nukes haven’t started flying yet. The half moon sets. A few drops of rain darken the sidewalk. I am regarded gravely by a red squirrel.
Crescent moon high in the east at dawn. Great-horned owls duet in the distance. A long freight train wraps the mountain in its rumble.
The half-moon at dawn wears the sparest of halos, glowing like an ear into which someone has just whispered something scandalous.
A hole in the clouds at dawn fails to hold the whole full moon—a brief, bright searchlight. Later, at sunrise, a chorus of chiselers as gray squirrels work on their black walnuts.
Very cold and still. A fingernail moon slips through the trees’ dark digits. Dawn comes with a shift of radiance from the snow-covered ground to the sky.
The sun clears the ridgetop and a bank of clouds by 8:30. The female Carolina wren trills, but there’s no sign of the male, who was missing last night from his usual roost above the laundry-room door. A half moon hangs overhead, pale as a slice of apple.
Frosty and still at dawn. A hunter’s flashlight ascends a ridgetop tree and goes out, subsumed by the crescent moon’s open parenthesis.
Mostly clear after last night’s rain. A flat-tire moon hangs low in the west. The wingbeats of a raven are, for a few moments, the loudest sound.