Clear and cold, with a faint patch of frost on the barn roof. Winged tulip tree seeds litter the porch. A red-bellied woodpecker tuts from the top of a tall locust.
tulip tree
9/16/2024
Sun in the top of the tall tulip poplar—yellow crowning yellow. The last nighttime cricket falls silent. Off through the thinning woods, new chinks of sky.
8/5/2024
Clear at sunrise, and cool enough that the crickets are still. I notice the big tulip tree at the woods’ edge has shed all its drought-stressed leaves and is green again.
7/31/2024
Rain drips from the roof and from the trees. Clouds are thinning out. The topmost leaves of the tall tulip poplar are waving.
7/15/2024
Breezy and warm. Half of the leaves on the big tulip tree at the woods’ edge have turned yellow from the drought, and are beginning to fall. A deer coughs by the springhouse.
6/8/2024
Cool and crystal-clear. The first sun to reach the meadow tries out a cage of chicken wire made for a volunteer tulip tree seedling, turning it into a shining tower above the weeds.
5/21/2024
Cool and nearly clear, save for a wash of high-altitude murk. The tall tulip tree at the woods’ edge is shedding petals, leaves waving like ravers in the slightest breeze.
5/4/2024
Gentle rain. The intense green of new leaves everywhere but inside the ring of fencing around a tulip tree that appeared in my yard during the pandemic like a blessing. Its buds show no sign they’ll ever open again. I don’t know why.
4/23/2024
The sun climbs from clarity into murk. Feeling insufficiently caffeinated, I watch the tulip tree’s tall, green torch fade to chartreuse.
4/15/2024
A still morning after last night’s violent storms. The tulip trees have burst their buds—a pale green haze. A few high clouds in the east turn purple.
4/7/2024
Crystal-clear at sunrise. Every morning more yellow—daffodils, spicebush. Leftover from winter, the bone-white branches of tulip poplar that squirrels have stripped to line their dreys.
11/27/2023
Gray and windy. The cedar tree moans against the house. A tulip poplar seed capsule comes spinning in and lands on my shoulder.
11/7/2023
Breezy and warm. With each gust of wind, a flotilla of leaves sets sail from the big tulip tree, as the sun ascends a ladder of clouds.
11/3/2023
On a cloudless, quiet mid-morning after a heavy frost, the ground remains white only in the shadows. A single orange leaf falls from the tall tulip poplar, spiraling slowly down into the dead goldenrods.