Fog at dawn, raucous with the calls of a whip-poor-will staking his claim to the woods’ edge, close enough that I can hear him clear his throat.
4/27/2024
Under a white sky, the rambling old white lilac is beginning to bloom. Half an hour past sunrise, the first, tentative raindrops on the roof.
4/26/2024
Out before dawn, I find moonlight in my chair. A song sparrow sings one phrase, possibly without waking up. A quiet trickle from the spring.
4/25/2024
Overcast and cold, with a red-bellied woodpecker’s ceaseless whinnying. The old crabapple tree is red and ready to open for sunshine and bees.
4/24/2024
Waiting for the rising sun to emerge from the clouds, I read half a book. The sky is a crazy quilt, orange and gray and pale blue. The birds are re-visiting all their classic hits.
4/23/2024
The sun climbs from clarity into murk. Feeling insufficiently caffeinated, I watch the tulip tree’s tall, green torch fade to chartreuse.
4/22/2024
Five degrees below freezing and still. A red-winged blackbird calls from a sunlit treetop above the springhouse and its tiny cattail marsh.
4/21/2024
It’s overcast and near freezing, but as soon as I step onto the porch, the worries that kept me awake half the night vanish. The woods’ edge is a gallery of swollen buds, blossoms, catkins and tiny leaves. Turkey gobbles blend with a train’s mournful horn.
4/20/2024
Cool with a clearing sky at sunrise. A blue-headed vireo’s soliloquy. The smell of damp earth.
4/19/2024
A heavy white sky giving few hints of sunrise. In the distance, the faint bells of a wood thrush. A field sparrow’s accelerating rush toward silence.
4/18/2024
Just past sunrise, a vagrant red squirrel appears in the yard, given away at first by her nervous, jerky movements as she forages for breakfast, then the old-barn color as she emerges from the lilac’s shadow, head swiveling about.
4/17/2024
The bridal wreath bush that persists in the shadow of the old lilac is in bloom—the only time of year I remember its existence. From just above it come the buzzy notes of a black-throated green warbler. The sky turns white.
4/16/2024
In the last few minutes before the sun crests the ridge, ghosts lingering among the trees turn back into blossoming shadbush. A chickadee is singing his spring song.
4/15/2024
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.