Another woods-edge maple has gone red. Bouncing bet still blooms beside the porch, four months on.
red maple
7/18/2022
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.
6/16/2022
Hazy and humid. The sun in the crown of the big dead maple. A hen turkey putting like a slow motor, summoning her chicks.
6/2/2022
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.
3/6/2022
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.
2/22/2022
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.
9/24/2020
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
6/3/2020
Thunderstorm just past, many leaves on the maple and black cherry trees remain upside-down, like pale, open palms turned toward the sky.
3/24/2020
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.
5/17/2019
The first, small, maple samaras are spinning down out of the gray sky. I’m startled when one seems to rise: a same-sized insect.
4/17/2019
A blush of blossoms on the ancient red maple, one of my most important teachers when I was young and learning to climb—on branches now gone.
1/17/2019
Gloomy, but the birds seem excited, perhaps sensing an approaching storm. A titmouse fleeing a fight lands on a maple limb red with fungus.
1/10/2019
The top of a dying red maple has been blown down across my walk. The wind raises a zombie army of leaves to go staggering over the snow.
12/14/2018
Warmish and almost sunny, with mist between the trees. The chickadees and wrens are denouncing something hidden in the small hollow maple.