Half an hour till sunrise. Over the brassy din of the dooryard birds, from off in the fog, the soft, wandering warble of a winter wren.
sunrise
March 27, 2014
A second male phoebe has returned. Their warring warbles echo off the hillside at sunrise, interspersed with a cowbird’s liquid notes.
March 21, 2014
Up early, I can’t set my hat-brim low enough to block the sun, so settle for bedazzlement. Two squirrels by the stream walking in circles.
January 22, 2014
Deep cold; nothing stirring but the wind. Clouds of snow blown off the trees are back-lit by the rising sun.
January 16, 2014
It’s cold—I can hear it in the way the wind hisses in the dead grass. As the sun climbs through the trees, I close one eye then the other.
December 25, 2013
Sunrise turns the western ridge crimson. Chickadees and titmice flit through the branches, calling, while we stand snapping pictures.
December 12, 2013
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.
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.