Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
A white sky at mid-morning beginning to glow as the clouds thin, while below in the meadow the white snakeroot is beginning to bloom. I find a dogwood sawfly larva from a later instar than yesterday’s fluffy white grubs; this is a proper green caterpillar crawling across my shirt.
The gibbous moon high overhead gives a ghostly second life to the white snakeroot in the yard, its seedy inflorescences seeming to bloom again. Then an air-braking 18-wheeler bellows for the dawn, and they begin to fade.
Mounds of white snakeroot in the yard glow dimly in the light of a half moon. Orion gets one leg over the ridge before he starts to fade, and the soft calls of migrant thrushes fill the trees.
Snakeroot flower heads are beginning to open, white as the cows’ milk that they’re said to poison. A sunbeam reaching the porch shows me the shape of my breath.
A white sky only now that the banks of white snakeroot are beginning to fade. In between: green and gold. The drought-struck lilac dying back.
Another cold morning. The sun through thin cirrus casts a wan light over the clouds of blossoming snakeroot.
A half moon hangs overhead, its light lost to the dawn. A bat makes one last circuit of the yard, where the white tops of snakeroot are beginning to show.
Cold and still at sunrise. A hummingbird zooms past, pausing over a snakeroot that is almost in bloom.
Gray above, white below: a snowbird hops atop five inches of fresh snow, noshing on goldenrod, snakeroot, and stiltgrass seeds, leaving lines of little arrows pointing backwards.
Another cool and quiet autumn morning. The snakeroot has faded to a blowsy brown just as the goldenrod reaches its pinnacle of yellow.
Crystal-clear and still. At first light, the soft calls of wood thrushes, no doubt tired and hungry after their all-night flights. Pale crowds of snakeroot seem to glow.
A gray squirrel with a nearly white tail scampering up the road draws my attention to the white snakeroot—banks of it just coming into bloom.
A high cloud ceiling full of holes. In the meadow, one snakeroot flower nods: hummingbird.
As above, so below: white sky, white snakeroot. A hummingbird buzzes in to bother the jewelweed below the porch.