Everything drips and glistens after last night’s storm. Red-bellied woodpeckers exchange calls then lapse into silence. A distant train. | Continue reading
A pause between showers. The thud of a walnut dropped by a squirrel. A housefly circles the porch. The rain starts back up. | Continue reading
The sun in fragments through the trees behind the old dead maple, which has a distinctly joyous appearance now that it’s shed its top half. | Continue reading
Cool and still, with sunlight at half strength due to atmospheric haze—smoke from Canada’s burning forests. A wood pewee’s bluesy melisma. | Continue reading
Cool and clear at sunrise. A yellow walnut leaf rests on the end table instead of a book. The slow motor of a bumblebee. | Continue reading
A meteor streaks the dawn sky—a fast, yellow brushstroke. From over the ridge, the quarry’s dull grind. The first, faint twittering from the meadow. | Continue reading
Clear and cold, with sun in the treetops. A pileated woodpecker in the yard lets loose with a cackle, prompting an immediate reply from off in the distance. | Continue reading
Cold and still at sunrise. A hummingbird zooms past, pausing over a snakeroot that is almost in bloom. | Continue reading
An autumnal sunrise, with crisp air and the creek full of voices, bracken browning in the yard, and the walnut leaves experimenting with carotenoids. | Continue reading
Steady rain with a bit of a breeze—the remains of a hurricane that got the wind knocked out of her and lost her eye. At 7:39 the Carolina wren finally […] | Continue reading
Drizzle. A family of wrens make the sprawling old lilac sing and shimmy. | Continue reading
Rain at dawn, tapering off by sunrise. Everything looks drenched. From behind the house, an indigo bunting’s cascade of notes. | Continue reading
Nearly silent at sunrise, except for the field crickets playing their only hit: so much autumn and melancholy in that raspy metronome. | Continue reading
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 […] | Continue reading
Partly cloudy and cool at sunrise, with 97% humidity and very little noise from—I’m guessing—valleys full of fog. A single-engine plane fades into the distance. | Continue reading
Cool and very humid. A thin cloud forms in the treetops, shot through with sun. A screech owl trills. | Continue reading
Darkness falls at 7:50 a.m. as a thunderstorm rumbles in. The yellow walnut leaves fluttering lazily down seem oddly unaffected by sudden sheets of rain. | Continue reading
Half an hour past sunrise, a hummingbird and a hoverfly both find my head to be an object of interest. A red-bellied woodpecker cackles from a tall locust. | Continue reading
Rain drips from the roof and from the trees. Clouds are thinning out. The topmost leaves of the tall tulip poplar are waving. | Continue reading
A white sky with a bright gash of sun. The red-eyed vireo falls silent, leaving only two crickets, one who chirps and one who trills. Then, inevitably, the wren. | Continue reading
A cabbage white butterfly dances in a patch of sun—the method to a madness of perfectly random moves. An annual cicada’s slowly falling note. | Continue reading
Another cool morning for a day forecast to be hot. A Carolina wren lands on the railing and cocks his head at me. A screech owl calls in the distance. | Continue reading
Sun in the treetops. I try to re-find the half moon—nothing but goldfinches. | Continue reading
Crystal-clear and cold. A mourning dove calls from the woods’ edge. A small patch of sun appears among the bracken, making a drought-struck frond twice as yellow. | Continue reading
Cloudy and damp, with long intervals between bird calls. A small woodpecker’s improbably loud rattle from the black locusts sets off a pair of Carolina wrens. | Continue reading
Overcast and still. A yellow walnut leaflet flutters down onto the fallen trunk of my favorite climbing tree when I was a kid. | Continue reading
Tree crickets rather than birdsong: it feels like late summer already. But after yesterday’s soaking rain, leaves no longer droop. I can smell the earth. | Continue reading
Cool and still with thin clouds. On the road-bank, a gray squirrel noses about in the leaves, as if searching its memory. | Continue reading
Cool and partly cloudy. A fledgling wren at the woods’ edge begs to be fed—an interrogatory whine. The mob of feral garlic heads are splitting their hoods. | Continue reading
Sun on leaves fading from shine to sheen. Sound is still out of the east: the slowly expanding crater swallowing farms and forests. It rumbles. It shakes. | Continue reading
Clear and still, except for the distant beeping of quarry trucks. A common yellowthroat darts through the lilac bush, foraging for breakfast. A gray squirrel sounds the hawk alarm. | Continue reading
Partly cloudy and cool. After yesterday evening’s brief rains, the happiness of the plants in my yard is nearly palpable. Formerly desiccated bergamot blossoms have swollen back into bloom. | Continue reading
Cloudy at sunrise. The bump bump of a groundhog returning to a burrow under the house. A dragonfly cuts back and forth across the yard. | Continue reading
Sunlight shimmers on the fur of a squirrel chiseling the shell of a disinterred nut, the morning coolness slowly giving way to heat. | Continue reading
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 […] | Continue reading
In the early morning coolness, a soft thunder of deer hooves up in the woods. From overhead, the calls of purple martins already on the wing. | Continue reading
Cool with murky, cloud-mediated sunlight. A hummingbird perches on a walnut branch for thirty seconds, head swiveling all about. | Continue reading
Crystal-clear and cool. A Cooper’s hawk calls from a sunlit limb at the woods’ edge—a sound I haven’t heard since early spring. | Continue reading
Here and there, the bracken in my yard is beginning to turn yellow. A hummingbird buzzes past, pausing to inspect several garlic heads. | Continue reading
Cool and clear. A pair of bindweed blossoms have opened on a fence post like microwave transmitters. A tiny patch of fog shelters from the sun in the lowest part […] | Continue reading
Every morning, more soapwort blossoms, and the raspberry canes are stretching into new territory. A harvestman stalks across my gray wasteland of a porch. | Continue reading
Clear and blessedly cool as sunlight floods the treetops. A distant siren. The incessant chatter of goldfinches. | Continue reading
Breezy and a bit less humid. A low buzz below the porch, where orange jewelweed attracts a ruby-throated hummingbird. A low rumble from my own stomach. | Continue reading
Humid and still, with clouds trailing low into the treetops—a typical morning in the tropics. The scolding and begging sounds of birds with fledglings. | Continue reading
Overcast and very humid. The big dial thermometer behind me on the wall is buzzing loudly. A minute later, a mud dauber wasp emerges. | Continue reading
A deer moves through the sunrise meadow, head and ears visible above the weeds. The furious chittering of a small flock of goldfinches swirling past. | Continue reading
The garlic heads in my yard give pause: a crowd of inverted commas, punctuating wildly. A goldfinch drops by to strip the seeds from an old weed stalk. | Continue reading
Cold and partly cloudy. A hummingbird buzzes in to sip from the jewelweed below the porch, then up to forage for small invertebrates on the leaves of a walnut tree. | Continue reading