Damp gloom suffused with white-throated sparrow song, high and thin and tremulous, amid bright splashes of yellow: daffodils, forsythia, spicebush.
spicebush
April 7, 2024
Crystal-clear at sunrise. Every morning more yellow—daffodils, spicebush. Leftover from winter, the bone-white branches of tulip poplar that squirrels have stripped to line their dreys.
October 13, 2023
Six degrees above freezing and clear at sunrise. The spicebushes next to the road are at their most luminous yellow. Chipmunks tick like asynchronous clocks.
June 27, 2022
Everything drips. A wood thrush chases a rival out of the woods and pauses in a spicebush for a look around.
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.
October 7, 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.
April 10, 2021
Overcast with 100% chance of yellow: daffodils, forsythia, spicebush. A yellow-bellied sapsucker looking all tapped out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
March 5, 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.
September 29, 2014
It’s cloudy, but the forest understorey glows with autumn color. A phoebe hawks flies from the spicebush, gurgling with satisfaction.