Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Partly cloudy and cool at sunrise, with more yellow and orange leaves than I’ve ever seen this early in the fall: not just walnut and black gum but black birch, tulip poplar, and even a few maples, just as our 30 acres of goldenrod approach their peak of bloom. I’m reminded of the Chinese name for San Francisco: old gold mountain.
Rain tapering off by mid-morning. I’m still entranced by the intense green of the trees, now supplemented by white clusters of black cherry blossoms and brown clusters of red maple keys.
Overcast and quiet. The gray hulk of a dead red maple by the road has dropped another small limb—former rung on my favorite ladder into the sky when I was small.
Overcast and gloomy. A single scarlet bough glows like a stoplight in the dark woods. The distant drumming of a pileated woodpecker.
The sun in fragments through the trees behind the old dead maple, which has a distinctly joyous appearance now that it’s shed its top half.
Steady rain—a gloomy sunrise. The big dead maple next to the road has the palest bark, its faces gone blank as masks.
Under a thin grin of moon, the maples reclaiming their red. Three crows wake up with awe in their throats.
A few minutes before sunrise, a crack followed by a crash from just inside the woods. I delude myself that I can detect the type of tree: sounds like a red maple, I’d say. So unlike the way they come into the world—miniature claws already red with autumn.
Another woods-edge maple has gone red. Bouncing bet still blooms beside the porch, four months on.
Fifteen hours of off-and-on rain and everything looks greener. The big red maple that just finished dying sheds a chunk of rotten wood.
Hazy and humid. The sun in the crown of the big dead maple. A hen turkey putting like a slow motor, summoning her chicks.
Overcast and cool. A red-bellied woodpecker lands on a rotten maple, witters softly and turns her head, listening for the telltale stirrings of breakfast.
Robin singing in the rain. It could be April but for the lingering patches of snow and the lack of a blush on the red maples.
Gray with occasional showers. Distant crows. The face that I can’t unsee in the big red maple trunk with its expression of perpetual dismay.