Trees pop in the cold. I close my eyes against the sun and watch its track fade on my retina: a connect-the-dots drawing gone wrong.
sunrise
December 11, 2013
Hollow thumps where a rabbit dashes across the slick snow-crust, alarmed, perhaps, by the sun’s blinding path through the trees.
December 4, 2013
Small birds appear as they fly past, and the sun, too, emerges only to vanish a second later, the fog turning from yellow back to white.
November 28, 2013
The sun! Rising through treetops turned to blazing crystal. The red-bellied woodpecker foraging for breakfast sounds distinctly unimpressed.
November 23, 2013
A bitter wind. Stripes of sunlight on the wet leaf duff glisten like slug trails, while in the west, a bank of black clouds moves in.
November 11, 2013
Sunrise. I watch the slow drift of contrail graffiti: I, I, I at cross angles, until they merge and disappear into spreading clouds.
October 28, 2013
At the base of the hill, the meadow is white with frost. A small deer carries the white torch of its tail up into the sunlit woods.
October 26, 2013
Cold and clear. Half the trees on the ridge are bare now, leaving narrow, blue windows all along the crest for the sun to pour through.
September 15, 2013
Cold at sunrise. A pileated woodpecker hitches up the trunk of tall locust, pausing to yell when he reaches the sunlit crown.
April 21, 2013
A towhee sits on a high branch at sunrise, his breast puffed out against the cold. His rufous feathers briefly match the color of the ridge.
March 10, 2013
The fluting of geese: just two of them, flying far apart. Sunrise seeps like a dirty secret between cracks in the clouds.
February 4, 2013
The sun rises above a mass of cloud looming like the lost, real mountain for which this is a foothill. A wren pops out from under the porch.
January 30, 2013
Dull yellow stripes in the fog: the rising sun slipping between ridge-top trees; thin tulip poplar branches chewed bare by a porcupine.
January 18, 2013
It’s very cold; the tall locust at the woods’ edge creaks with ice. A woodpecker taps on the topmost limb, silhouetted against pink clouds.