Under dark clouds, the field full of goldenrod glows in the rising sun’s light like some Viking hoard in an archaeologist’s trench.
sunrise
February 11, 2017
Ten degrees above freezing at sunrise. A squirrel leaps through the soft snow like a salmon swimming upstream. High overhead, a raven calls.
December 31, 2016
Cold and very still. The sun climbs through the ridgetop trees as slowly and bristly as a porcupine of light.
December 20, 2016
Thick hoarfrost gives the sun rising through the trees a soft, glittery nimbus, and the aging snowpack has regained the sparkle of youth.
November 22, 2016
Windy and cold. The rising sun peeks out from beneath a lid of clouds: in the sudden glow, goldfinches, their squeaky calls.
October 11, 2016
Sunrise turns the western ridge red. A squirrel falls out of a walnut tree and lands with a thump in weeds white with the first frost.
September 22, 2016
Clear and cold at sunrise. A migrant thrush calls from the not-yet-ruined temple of the trees. Overhead, the archaic smile of the moon.
September 11, 2016
Cool and clear, with sunlight just beginning to gild the treetops. From the woods’ edge, the plucked-string call of a migrant tanager.
August 5, 2016
Sunrise. A deer grazes at the woods’ edge. A phoebe perches beside her and makes repeated sorties over her back, snapping up the deerflies.
August 2, 2016
Fog glowing sunrise-orange. Sound is out of the east: traffic, freight trains, the crusher at the quarry. A chickadee sings both his songs.
April 17, 2016
The raspy call of a red-winged blackbird, rare visitor to the mountain. A lone Canada goose goes over, honking steadily. The sun comes up.
March 23, 2016
Sunrise, and seven species of birds are calling—but not the phoebe, who flies in and out of the old nest under the springhouse eaves.
March 11, 2016
Sunrise tints the clouds orange. I squint through eyelids made bleary with pink-eye and lack of sleep. A downy woodpecker’s soft rattle.
October 27, 2015
With the leaves half down, I can see inside the forest again: squirrels leaping from branch to branch, a ridgetop flock, the rising sun.