Everything drips. A wood thrush chases a rival out of the woods and pauses in a spicebush for a look around.
spicebush
Sunday October 31, 2021
The rain stops but the trees go on dripping. The sky brightens. Through newly bare spicebush branches, I can see the springhouse once again.
Thursday October 07, 2021
Rain and fog. With the goldenrod going gray, the yellow has moved from the meadow to the woods’ edge: spicebush, walnut, birch, elm, tulip tree.
Saturday April 10, 2021
Overcast with 100% chance of yellow: daffodils, forsythia, spicebush. A yellow-bellied sapsucker looking all tapped out.
Saturday April 13, 2019
Two spicebushes side by side, one still bare, the other in full yellow fuzz. Up in the woods, the soft song of the first blue-headed vireo.
Saturday January 12, 2019
As bright as the sun seems, shining through thin cloud, there are almost no shadows. A song sparrow sits in a spicebush, looking all around.
Saturday April 28, 2018
Sun warms the porch; a rising buzz of flies. Each spicebush around the farm is yellowing up on its own schedule, bud to fuzz to frowze.
Tuesday October 31, 2017
The big windthrown locust tree is nearly invisible in the high weeds. Out back, an old snake skin flutters from the branches of a spicebush.
Tuesday October 24, 2017
Red: berries on a leafless spicebush, gaps between segments of a curled-up black caterpillar, paint on the porch floor lifting like leaves.
Sunday March 05, 2017
A downy woodpecker in the spicebush hangs from a silk moth cocoon, trying to reach the pupa, but the soft stuff defeats her hammer and nail.
Monday September 29, 2014
It’s cloudy, but the forest understorey glows with autumn color. A phoebe hawks flies from the spicebush, gurgling with satisfaction.
Tuesday January 14, 2014
At the woods’ edge, a jumble of bone-white sticks: spicebush branches debarked by rabbits. A gray blur where a titmouse grooms in the lilac.
Wednesday August 29, 2012
Around the side of the house, a male goldfinch gorges on spicebush berries—silent for once, as if unwilling to share his find.
Sunday August 19, 2012
I get up to pick the ripe berries on the spicebush in my garden. Allspice aroma wafts up from the red drupes as I pinch them off the twigs.