A raven flies over the house, croaking. I keep wiping droplets of mist off the glossy pages of the book I’m reading about the holocaust.
rain
October 27, 2018
Rain again. This is the dreariest, drabbest autumn I’ve ever seen—except for the moss and tree-bark lichens, which have never been brighter.
October 20, 2018
Now that I can see the quaking aspens, through bare walnut branches, I can hear them too: their constant whisper. Gauzy rain. A train horn.
October 11, 2018
Hard, steady rain—yet somehow certain small, filmy-winged insects still manage to fly. From the woods’ edge, a towhee’s eponymous call.
October 8, 2018
Fog and a fine drizzle. A monarch butterfly, oranger than any leaf in view, glides past in the wrong direction. The cheep cheep of a peeper.
September 26, 2018
The rain has stopped but the creek keeps singing like a drunk going home from a party. The sun comes out and all the house’s windows fog up.
September 21, 2018
Overcast and still, with the smell of rain. A migrant red-breasted nuthatch dives at my head and lands between the spandrels to scold.
September 17, 2018
Rain from a named storm seems special, like strands of hair from someone famous. Two spring peepers are calling, and faintly, the phoebe.
September 14, 2018
The dampness thickens into drizzle. Its soundtrack: the unending trill of tree crickets. The forest begins to glisten like a salamander.
May 6, 2018
The all-night rain has eased into drizzle. A drenched squirrel plods through the yard. A catbird appears on a branch and sings half a note.
April 27, 2018
The rain peters out, and the daffodils stop bobbing to its beat like headbangers. A gnatcatcher resumes its sallies from the lilac bush.
April 19, 2018
I slept in, but what have I slept into? Rain. No, snow. No, sun. The wind roaring on the wrong ridge. Church bells ringing in town.
April 16, 2018
The sound of water has returned to the mountain. Trees wear dark suits of rain embroidered with lichen. In every puddle the same blank sky.
April 3, 2018
Cold rain and fog. A squirrel disappears into the old flicker den hole in the dead elm, that smooth, ruined column at the edge of the yard.