Clear, cold and still. I can’t stop gazing at the red oak seedling I found in the yard yesterday and immediately caged in a ring of deer fencing, its four jaunty leaves above a sea of invasive periwinkle.
myrtle
October 20, 2022
Dawn brings a chittering of sparrows from the meadow. It’s cold. Frost edges the periwinkle leaves.
December 15, 2021
Patchy frost: the myrtle leaves that are dusted with it versus those that just have white edging. A chickadee is getting the gang together.
November 6, 2021
Cold and very still. Every leaf in the myrtle patch—Grandma’s legacy—is edged in white. Sunrise stains the western ridge blood-red.
January 3, 2018
Deer came in the night and dug up half the yard to get at the evergreen myrtle. Sun pours down from a cloudless sky. A song sparrow sings.
October 19, 2017
Two patches of sunlight side-by-side on the myrtle: one direct from the sun that glistens, one reflected from a window that merely glows.
October 26, 2016
Sun through thin, high clouds—light for a much milder morning than this one in which periwinkle leaves glitter with melting hoarfrost.
May 25, 2016
Warm and hazy. The yard buzzes with native bees pollinating the alien, invasive myrtle. Off in the woods, the glint of old glass.
April 4, 2015
Fast moving cumulus clouds. When the sun comes out, it glistens on the mountain laurel leaves in the woods and in the yard, the periwinkle.
August 13, 2014
While I’ve been gone, two invading armies have battled for control of the yard. The stiltgrass seems to be winning against the periwinkle.
April 28, 2014
On the myrtle flowers, nothing but native bees. The sun fades. A black-throated green warbler calls, switching between its two buzzy songs.
April 22, 2014
The myrtle that has taken over half my yard is in bloom: a scatter of blue. At the woods’ edge, two blue-headed vireos compare songs.
January 20, 2014
Brown patches in the yard where deer have pawed the snow aside to eat myrtle. An oak leaf curled like a stillborn spirals down from the sky.
November 22, 2012
A deer under the lilac glows strangely in the sunlight refracted from my bedroom window. The waxy myrtle leaves crackle between her teeth.