Another cool, cloudless morning. The springhouse tulip tree is in bloom, looking more like a lotus tree: fat yellow flowers seemingly taken from a lake and lifted high into the blue.
tulip tree
April 29, 2025
Like a bear on a unicycle, the big tulip tree at the woods’ edge with its tiny, perfect leaves fluttering in the breeze. Three gray squirrels slowly spiral round its trunk.
March 23, 2025
Clear, cold, and quiet. The rising moon gleams like a scimitar as it passes behind the big tulip tree, and emerges five minutes later as pale as a grub.
December 15, 2024
Gray and still, except for the creek’s trickle. A squirrel dangles from a low branch of the springhouse tulip tree, trying in vain to tear off a strip of bark.
November 30, 2024
Bitter cold and still at dawn, as the first silouette of a squirrel emerges from its nest of sticks and leaves high in the limbs of the big tulip and descends the tree, claws ticking against the bark. The clouds redden. A distant rifle booms.
November 12, 2024
An hour past sunrise, the sky is half blue. The two-year-old tulip tree inside its cage of fencing waves a last, yellow leaf.
October 10, 2024
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.
September 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.
August 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.
July 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.
July 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.
June 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.
May 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.
May 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.