Overcast and damp, with the intense green of new leaves everywhere. Two doves moan in different keys. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks down the road out of sight.
mourning doves
Clear at dawn, with the bright crescent moon inching teeth-first through the treetops. A mourning dove plays a downbeat rooster.
An hour after sunrise and the squirrels are mostly back in their burrows. Weak sunlight on a snowfall fine as flour. A mourning dove calls.
Overcast and two degrees above freezing at dawn, the inversion layer bringing traffic noise from the valley to mingle with scattered chirps and the whistles of dove wings.
Very cold and still. Over by the springhouse, juncos are making their happy sounds. A mourning dove moans.
A stray snowflake wanders down from the pink clouds, itself still white. Doves flock to the birdseed on my mother’s back porch—the silvery whistles of their wings.
A clearing wind at dawn, after some much-needed rain. A mourning dove sits placidly on a swaying branch, facing east.
Two hours past sunrise, a scarlet tanager sings unchallenged from a tree in the yard. The sunlight fades in and out. A mourning dove calls in the distance.
Another clear, cold morning. Two mourning doves call back and forth, occasionally overlapping, as the sunlight inches down toward their perches.
Patches of blue. The mourning dove’s incessant cooing finally comes to an end, leaving the daffodils’ ensemble of horns to their silence.
A mottled sky half an hour past sunrise. It’s quiet. The dove who was calling at first light, as if it were March already, must’ve gone back to sleep.
Dawn clouds stacked liked a ladder of blood. Chattering nuthatches. A dove’s breathy song sounds far from mournful.
It’s the last overcast dawn for days, they say, so I try to find something to savor in the cold gloom, among the rumbles of distant machines and the one-note whistles of dove wings.
Heavy gray clouds, and a breeze from the east: storm coming. Something flushes all the doves from the spring—a euphony of bright notes.