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.
tulip tree
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rain drips from the roof and from the trees. Clouds are thinning out. The topmost leaves of the tall tulip poplar are waving.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The sun climbs from clarity into murk. Feeling insufficiently caffeinated, I watch the tulip tree’s tall, green torch fade to chartreuse.
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.