Wind and clouds and the clattering of treetops rocking out of sync. Two squirrels hunting the last unfallen acorns keep climbing into the top branches of a big red oak, hanging by their hind legs to peel their prizes.
oaks
Cold and gray, with the wind hissing through the last few oak leaves still on the trees. The male Carolina wren sleeps in past his mate, her ‘response’ preceding his call by nearly five minutes.
The red of the oaks gets an assist, first from the dawn and then the sunrise, blazing scarlet, copper or burgundy in each vase-shaped crown.
Cool and clear with a breeze in the treetops, glossy oak leaves scintillating in the sun. A distant crow is trying to raise a ruckus, but no one joins in.
Rainfall stopping by sunrise. An oak leaf comes sailing out of the woods and spirals down onto the porch. Holes in the clouds open and close like blue wounds.
Blue-gray layered with yellow-orange a half hour past sunrise. The creek is still singing about Tuesday’s rain, and the one oak at the woods’ edge that always holds onto its dead leaves hisses in the wind.
Sun through thin, high clouds—enough to make the last few scarlet oak crowns glow. An ambulance wails through the gap.
The sun clears the ridge and I’m blinded—the oaks are mostly bare now. Those that aren’t, glow red like a scattering of old barns.
As the moonlight fades, pale patches remain—a killing frost. The woods’ edge is nearly bare of leaves below the brick-red crowns of the oaks.
Cold and clear aside from some high-atmosphere haze, which gives the light a timeless feel as the sun climbs through a hillside of flowering oaks.
Dawn comes with a light breeze rummaging through the oaks, a freight train laboring up the valley, the tutting of robins.
A lone crow like a town crier repeating the same bit of news: how the rising sun, newly naked, is ablaze beneath the crowns of the oaks.
The oaks are twice as naked as they were yesterday. From above the clouds, a single clarinet note that might or might not be a Canada goose.
Clear and quiet except for the soft click-clack of oak leaves, slipping through a gauntlet of bare branches on their way to the ground.