Red at dawn, and red again at sunrise for the last day of regular firearms deer season. Finally, at fifteen minutes past sunrise, a rifle booms. Then silence again.
sunrise
Fog hides the sunrise, apart from a small opening on the ridgetop that fills with golden light. Then the gray curtain comes down again.
A scurf of snow on the ground. A few fat clouds, barely moving, turn orange. A lone crow in the treetops coos like a dove.
Another still, cold sunrise. I watch Venus creeping through the crown of a black locust, dwindling to a point that finally vanishes behind a flotilla of small clouds.
Wet and overcast at sunrise. The forest floor with its carpet of leaves almost glows for a minute or two before subsiding into ordinary brown.
Waiting for the sun as the western ridge turns from pink to orange to yellow. The plastic flamingo in my garden is furred with frost.
Cold and still at sunrise. The western ridge turns from barn-red to gold, like an autumn in reverse.
Sunrise hidden by a layer of cloud. A white-footed mouse explores the corrugated roof over my oil tanks, its likely sickness shown by its lack of fear.
22F/-5C at sunrise. Every twig and leaf is lightly frosted. I watch my clouds of breath drift into the yard.
A few patches of frost in the yard as the sun clears the ridgetop. Juncos move through the rambling old lilac, its last few leaves faded nearly to yellow.
Overcast and quiet an hour before sunrise. Hunters’ headlamps move back and forth on the dark hillside like lost stars.
The sun clears the ridge and I’m blinded—the oaks are mostly bare now. Those that aren’t, glow red like a scattering of old barns.
Sunrise glowing orange between the half-naked ridgetop oaks. The yard fills with small birds: sparrows, kinglets, the inevitable wren.
Overcast sunrise for the return to standard time. The restless footsteps of a buck below the house, carrying his rack of bare branches into the woods.