Partly cloudy and cool at sunrise, with 97% humidity and very little noise from—I’m guessing—valleys full of fog. A single-engine plane fades into the distance.
plane
February 6, 2024
Clear and cold, the ground gray with frost. Sunrise reddens the western ridge. A propeller plane fades into the distance.
February 2, 2023
Clear and cold at the crack of dawn. A propeller plane comes blinking out of the east, banks and follows the mountain south, engine fading into a quiet trickle from the spring.
September 27, 2021
My first day on earth without a father. It takes me ten minutes to notice the sky—cloudless blue. The laboring engine of a distant plane.
February 17, 2021
The least gloomy morning in more than a week—and also the coldest. A single-prop plane goes in and out of sunlight, trailed by its sound.
December 13, 2019
Two degrees below freezing, but the rain remains rain. Somewhere above the fog, an airplane’s single propeller.
November 13, 2018
Two oak leaves are caught by a birch, one after the other. From somewhere in the clouds, the buzzing rattle of a plane with a loose part.
November 30, 2017
Frost on the bent-down blades of cattails. Two single-prop planes from different directions—their drones blending then separating again.
October 21, 2017
Three propeller planes in half an hour, noisy as airborne lawnmowers. It’s peak haiku time, but I could disappear into a novel.
March 13, 2017
The drone of a single-prop plane, hidden like the horizon by trees. A mourning dove calls. The sun slowly submerges in a mud bath of clouds.
April 6, 2016
Quiet except for a distant plane. A pair of squirrels race nose-to-tail through the yard, slowing only when they clamber through the lilac.
December 30, 2014
The rooster’s call is still all wrong—despairing rather than jubilant. An airplane engine drops in pitch as it fades into the distance.
September 18, 2014
A black ichneumon wasp climbs the white porch column, wings twitching like an ill-fitting suit. The lawnmower sound of a propeller plane.
April 17, 2014
A single-prop plane circles high over the valley for more than an hour—flying lesson? A missing child? The dry rattle of chipping sparrows.