Cloudy with a 100% chance of warblers. A wood thrush gets a drink from the stream and resumes singing. The smell of lilacs.
stream
5/8/2022
A wet and shining woods stippled with burst buds. Over the rush of the creek, a cerulean warbler’s buzzy love song to the sky.
5/7/2022
After 24 hours of rain, water streams from the mountain’s every pore. The daffodils’ last trumpet points toward the forest.
4/8/2022
Crystal-clear. Treetops stained with sun. A gray squirrel pours itself into the lilac. The creek’s full-throated chorus.
3/8/2022
Back to more typical March weather, gloomy and cold. The stream gurgles low, the wren gurgles high, and two crows wing their way in silence to a breakfast of bones.
2/20/2022
Clear and still. The stream has subsided from a roar to a babble: one inmate instead of the whole asylum. The first, skinny clouds.
2/19/2022
A flash mob of snowflakes rushing this way and that. Over the sound of water, the wind: all hiss, no hush.
2/5/2022
Clouds going from pink to orange to yellow as the sky turns paler blue, all to the sound of running water and the whistling of doves’ wings.
2/4/2022
Dawn, and all the stream’s voices are raised. A squirrel finds a black walnut sticking out of a snowbank and races off with it.
1/31/2022
Bitter cold. A garlic mustard skeleton hanging over the small hole in the yard that goes down to an underground stream is shaggy with frost.
1/16/2022
My first morning back since the New Year: clear, still, and bitter cold. The stream’s gurgle. The enthusiasm of small birds for the sunrise.
12/21/2021
Solstice, and the ground is white with frost. The stream has subsided to the quietest of gurgles. Assorted chirps from sparrows and the inevitable wren.
12/2/2021
It’s damp and warmish. A red-bellied woodpecker comes silently rocketing out of the woods. The creek remains mum about last night’s rain.
11/18/2021
The streamside barberry is orange as a hunter’s cap. A crow silhouetted against the sunrise swipes its bill on the branch as if sharpening a knife.