Thick fog, returning to the forest its foreignness—the sense that any sound could be a footfall, that the rain is a many-legged beast.
rain
Fog moves back and forth over the snow as the rain thickens. Two hunters emerge, a girl and her grandfather—blaze-orange among the gray.
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 again. This is the dreariest, drabbest autumn I’ve ever seen—except for the moss and tree-bark lichens, which have never been brighter.
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.
Hard, steady rain—yet somehow certain small, filmy-winged insects still manage to fly. From the woods’ edge, a towhee’s eponymous call.
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.
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.
Overcast and still, with the smell of rain. A migrant red-breasted nuthatch dives at my head and lands between the spandrels to scold.
Rain from a named storm seems special, like strands of hair from someone famous. Two spring peepers are calling, and faintly, the phoebe.
The dampness thickens into drizzle. Its soundtrack: the unending trill of tree crickets. The forest begins to glisten like a salamander.
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.
The rain peters out, and the daffodils stop bobbing to its beat like headbangers. A gnatcatcher resumes its sallies from the lilac bush.
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.