Overcast and gloomy. A single scarlet bough glows like a stoplight in the dark woods. The distant drumming of a pileated woodpecker.
red maple
August 16, 2024
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.
December 10, 2023
Steady rain—a gloomy sunrise. The big dead maple next to the road has the palest bark, its faces gone blank as masks.
October 11, 2023
Under a thin grin of moon, the maples reclaiming their red. Three crows wake up with awe in their throats.
September 25, 2023
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.
October 6, 2022
Another woods-edge maple has gone red. Bouncing bet still blooms beside the porch, four months on.
July 18, 2022
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.
June 16, 2022
Hazy and humid. The sun in the crown of the big dead maple. A hen turkey putting like a slow motor, summoning her chicks.
June 2, 2022
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.
March 6, 2022
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.
February 22, 2022
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.
September 24, 2020
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
June 3, 2020
Thunderstorm just past, many leaves on the maple and black cherry trees remain upside-down, like pale, open palms turned toward the sky.
March 24, 2020
A gray day. My fever broken, I notice that the red maple down along the woods’ edge that had blossomed too soon two weeks ago is bare again.