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.
red maple
Thursday 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.
Thursday June 02, 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.
Sunday March 06, 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.
Tuesday 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.
Thursday September 24, 2020
Two squirrels trace a fast single helix down the trunk of the big maple. The typewriter rattle of their claws.
Wednesday June 03, 2020
Thunderstorm just past, many leaves on the maple and black cherry trees remain upside-down, like pale, open palms turned toward the sky.
Tuesday 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.
Friday May 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.
Wednesday April 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.
Thursday January 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.
Thursday January 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.
Friday December 14, 2018
Warmish and almost sunny, with mist between the trees. The chickadees and wrens are denouncing something hidden in the small hollow maple.
Tuesday November 06, 2018
With birches and maples at the woods’ edge all bare, I can see unimpeded up the hillside to small clouds lost among the trees and the rain.