A heavy sky, gravid with rain. In the town a mile and a half way, a fire siren—that hortatory wail. Then the ululations of the trucks.
trucks
Another cool morning. From over the ridge, an inversion layer relays the whine of tires on asphalt and the keening work-songs of trucks.
Warmer, and the daffodils have once more managed to stand up. There goes the meter-reader’s white pickup, topped by a flashing orange light.
After verifying that the latest vehicle to drive up does not contain her people, the old dog lies down, resignation written in every muscle.
A bright period between showers. Coming around the bend in the road, the flashing yellow light on the roof of the meter-reader’s truck.
Through driving snow, our neighbor is out plowing the road. The plow’s hydraulics whine like a sled dog. Tire chains scrabble at the ice.
Fog. In the absence of the usual noise from quarry and factories, I can hear every grunt and groan of the trucks jake-braking on I-99.
The sun slowly dims in the whitening sky. Soft taps of a woodpecker. The flashing orange light on the roof of the meter reader’s truck.
Over the rumbling of an oil truck, the cry of a gull far from the sea. I go to the edge of the porch and look: a V of gulls heading west.
Sound, like the rest of the weather, is out of the east: plow trucks, slow-moving trains, a dog barking on and on at the falling snow.
A red-bellied woodpecker yammers from tree to tree, all around the yard. A builder drives by with nothing in the bed of his truck.
On a dark, rainy morning, the flashing orange light on the meter reader’s truck. A heron flies over the house—its long, skinny legs.
Traffic noise from over the hill is deafening—the icy snowpack has become a sounding board. In the tulip tree, four slow, amorous squirrels.
The distant gargle of compression release engine brakes. Dark clouds moving very slowly, as if deliberating where to drop their rain.