Cloudless and still, except for the Amish men with nail guns firing into the roof of my mother’s house. The sun clears the ridge. A saw sinks its teeth into […] | Continue reading
Overcast at sunrise, with just three small clouds turning pink. The top roof drips dew onto the porch roof: a rhythmless percussion. Each time I look up from my book, […] | Continue reading
Drizzle at sunrise. Rain-slick tree trunks shine in their green sleeves of lichen. The sky shows signs of breaking up. | Continue reading
Thick fog. A screech owl trills, seemingly in answer to the wren. Then crows join the chat. The owl’s trilling pauses, then resumes a quarter mile away. | Continue reading
Freezing fog that lifts after sunrise into a gray woolen sky, leaving frosted branches for the squirrels—gray or red, cautious or pell-mell. | Continue reading
An inch of wet snow, glowing like a second sky on every branch and twig. I catch a rare whiff of sewage from the treatment plant three miles away. | Continue reading
Cold and still. A sky etched with faintly pink contrails. The song sparrows sing in fragments, while the white-throated sparrows merely chirp. | Continue reading
Partly clear and windy at sunrise. A sharp-shinned hawk comes in low over the houses, immediately attracts the attention of crows, and flees back north with three in hot pursuit. | Continue reading
Wind and clouds and the clattering of treetops rocking out of sync. Two squirrels hunting the last unfallen acorns keep climbing into the top branches of a big red oak, […] | Continue reading
A raven with something red in its beak. Three running deer causing a fourth to raise and lower her tail. Patches of gold appear among the clouds. | Continue reading
Frosty and still at dawn. A hunter’s flashlight ascends a ridgetop tree and goes out, subsumed by the crescent moon’s open parenthesis. | Continue reading
Cold and mostly clear. An occasional sound of trains or traffic rises above the shush of wind. A single red cloud scuds overhead and disappears off east. | Continue reading
Cold and gray, with the wind hissing through the last few oak leaves still on the trees. The male Carolina wren sleeps in past his mate, her ‘response’ preceding his […] | Continue reading
A bitter wind has brought the first, thin snowfall. I open my folding seat cushion and find a yellow leaf nestled like a letter in an envelope. | Continue reading
Fine flakes falling from a mottled gray sky. At the bottom of the hollow, two trains whistle the crossing at once, one high, one low. | Continue reading
Thick fog. When the wren stops singing, there’s dead silence for several minutes until a nuthatch calls. From father away, the death-cry of a rabbit. | Continue reading
Mostly clear after last night’s rain. A flat-tire moon hangs low in the west. The wingbeats of a raven are, for a few moments, the loudest sound. | Continue reading
Cold and still. The sun is a bright smudge slowly shrinking into a blaze as the clouds thin out. A train horn blows an almost perfect minor chord. | Continue reading
Clear and cold, with wind supplying all the voices in the dawn chorus. A crow rockets past, wings at an oblique angle to its direction of travel, cheering itself on. | Continue reading
A mackerel sky slowly clearing off by mid-morning. A Carolina wren trills in the distance. The slightest of breezes makes the tulip tree’s remaining leaves tremble. | Continue reading
The red of the oaks gets an assist, first from the dawn and then the sunrise, blazing scarlet, copper or burgundy in each vase-shaped crown. | Continue reading
Sunrise delayed for a few minutes by a low bank of clouds. A gray squirrel emerges from its nest high in a black cherry and dashes down the newly exposed […] | Continue reading
Clear and cold. The sun pops up—the pea in our daylight-savings shell game. A screech owl begins to trill. | Continue reading
Red sky behind red leaves at sunrise. In the yard, big winds have stripped the tulip tree of all but its smallest leaves—the sheerest of dresses. | Continue reading
Cold wind seasoned with rain—almost maritime weather. I sit in my old barn coat like a barnacle, listening for the approach of dawn. | Continue reading
Hard rain easing off by mid-morning. The sky brightens. A junco by the springhouse warbles its most complex song. | Continue reading
Clouds gather in the east, glowing brightly as they smother the sun. A west-bound freight rumbles through the gap. Bits of walnut shell rain down from a squirrel’s breakfast. | Continue reading
Heavy frost in the yard. A few, faint clouds disappear after sunrise, as squirrels climb high into the wine-red crowns of oaks. | Continue reading
A degree above freezing, with an inversion layer bringing sound from the quarry: shrill beeps and muffled thunders of stone. In the time it takes my cereal to cook, dawn […] | Continue reading
Clear and still, with patches of light frost. The sky has made considerable inroads into the forest just since yesterday. A jay’s waking call elicits a reply from the far […] | Continue reading
Clear and still at dawn. As the last stars fade, the first sparrows begin to chirp. A crow alights on the tallest locust and begins to yell. | Continue reading
Heavily overcast at sunrise, signaled only by an upsurge in birdsong from dozens of white-throated sparrows, the Carolina wren, and a screech owl quavering in the pines. | Continue reading
Gray skies with a bitter wind. Colored leaves fly past. A pair of gray squirrels meet on the trunk of a black locust and touch snouts. | Continue reading
Wind breaking up the yellow-bellied clouds. Tulip tree samaras spin like the blades of invisible helicopters—a whole squadron headed out into the meadow. | Continue reading
Dawn turns the western ridge orange, as the roar of traffic from an inversion layer nearly drowns out the waking songbirds—all but the Carolina wren, whose teakettle teakettle teakettle is […] | Continue reading
Wind and rain at dawn. Half an hour before sunrise, a great twittering erupts from the meadow as hundreds of white-throated sparrows, sheltering deep in the goldenrod, begin to awaken. | Continue reading
Thin clouds at sunrise. I squint at a piece of cattail down floating below the balustrade and it turns into the skinniest white spider I’ve seen, ascending an invisible thread. | Continue reading
An hour before sunrise, the crescent moon makes a brief appearance through the clouds. A barred owl calls. Two hunters follow their flashlight beams into the woods. | Continue reading
Cold and quiet, with a few clouds. A raven flies over the house issuing stentorian croaks, his mate following in silence. | Continue reading
Clear and cold, with a breeze out of the north. I get my winter coat out of storage, make clouds with my breath. Church bells from town toll the hour. | Continue reading
Bright periods alternate with gloom on a cool, cloudy morning, with an intermittent breeze paging through the tulip tree leaves. A sound like the clacking of a typewriter as a […] | Continue reading
Heavily gray skies at mid-morning. A tree cricket trills in the garden—a bright drone note. The wind goes past, releasing a small crowd of yellow leaves. | Continue reading
Steady rain from heavy clouds, with the seeming glow of orange and yellow leaves in lieu of a sunrise. A drenched gray squirrel beside the porch peers up at the […] | Continue reading
From hard rain to a shimmer of drizzle to almost-sun by late morning, I have sat with a wounded foot propped up on the porch railing like an unlucky rabbit, […] | Continue reading
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 […] | Continue reading
Cloudy and cold at mid-morning. The high lisp of a brown creeper at the woods’ edge. In the distance, a gray squirrel is airing a complaint about a hawk. | Continue reading
Cold, clear, and quiet except for the crow in the road when I came out, who took several, labored wingbeats to reach his high-pitched cry. | Continue reading
Early-morning rain past, a chill breeze stirs in the tulip poplar beside the springhouse, four-lobed leaves waving like jazz hands on a thousand-armed bodhisattva, some green, some yellow. | Continue reading