An hour past sunrise, an opossum is out hunting earthworms pushed out of their burrows by the all-night rain. She keeps pausing to raise her snout and sniff the air like a connoisseur.
rain
Steady rain. A gnatcatcher flutters to find breakfast on the undersides of leaves, then retreats to the shelter of the lilac to shake the water off. A chipmunk runs under my chair to eat one seed at the far end of the porch.
Gloomy sunrise, with a cloud snagged on the treetops, leaking rain. A titmouse takes advantage of a lull in the chorus to hype his own claim. A tanager’s plucked string.
Gentle rain. The intense green of new leaves everywhere but inside the ring of fencing around a tulip tree that appeared in my yard during the pandemic like a blessing. Its buds show no sign they’ll ever open again. I don’t know why.
Cloudless at sunrise, with rain still clinging to the grass. Tree leaves are on average half open now, making the woods’ edge half screen, half wall.
Under a white sky, the rambling old white lilac is beginning to bloom. Half an hour past sunrise, the first, tentative raindrops on the roof.
Rainy and cool. An eastern towhee is urging me—according to the time-honored birders’ mnemonic—to drink my tea, while woodpeckers large and small bang their heads against the trees.
A spit of rain in my face at sunrise, despite the lack of clouds—classic April. It’s cold. The miniature daffodils have been blooming for a solid month.
In the pre-dawn darkness, nothing but the sounds of rain and water. A low rumbling comes from the hole in my yard that leads down to the stream just before it emerges into a spring.
Rain. Every ditch runs with whitewater. Behind the bright forsythia, a gray wall of fog swallows the trees. Nevertheless, a wren.
The all-night rain doesn’t let up for dawn. The dim light spreads from the southeast, where the waning moon must be, to the east. It’s April. Fools and poets rejoice.
Rain and fog. The birds call one at a time, as if auditioning. A sodden squirrel, grayer than gray, trots across the gray gravel road.
Rain and robin song. The sky darkens. The black birches look dapper in their gray-green suits of lichen.
Dripping at dawn has thickened into steady rain by the time I get out of the shower. The robins, cardinals, woodpeckers and wrens seem barely to have noticed. It’s spring.