Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Clear and cool—the first morning of a dry high. A hummingbird visits the orange jewelweed below the porch. A pungent, camphor-like odor makes me think of blossoming yarrow, but I finally decide instead it’s coming from the black locust limbs smashed down in a storm more than a week ago.
Breezy and cool, with enough high-altitude murk to keep the sun at half strength. A firefly circles the arm of my chair. Two more bindweed blossoms have opened above yesterday’s, which hangs limp as an empty balloon.
A white bindweed flower has opened in the yard—morning glory enough for a sky more white than blue. Wild garlic heads have almost all straightened up and begun to split open.
After a downpour at dawn, the sky brightens, then darkens again. The aspen and tulip tree saplings in my yard take turns trembling in the breeze. The tanager sings.
A sun shower an hour after sunrise. Hummingbirds battle over the mop-headed bergamot. I scuttle back indoors to get things done before a scheduled power outage.
Overcast and cool. A hen turkey foraging at the woods’ edge suddenly vaults into the air with a great flapping and clucking and lands on a low walnut limb, a red fox like an apparition melting back into the shadows.
Rain subsiding into mizzle by mid-morning. The distant thunder of a pileated woodpecker. A scarlet tanager sings quietly from the small trees below my mother’s sitting room.
Low clouds merging into fog. In the front garden, several dozen bergamots are in bloom, rain dripping from their purple locks. A very sodden chipmunk runs past my feet.
Foggy and cool. I sit enjoying the deep stillness, gazing at the wreckage from last night’s storm—two black birches smashed down by the top half of a black locust—and anticipating the chainsaw’s roar.
Cooler and less humid after last night’s storms. The sun finds my face through an opening in the canopy of an oak, and I’m repeatedly dive-bombed by a butterfly—Polygonia interrogationis, I think. A question mark.
In the morning coolness, a groundhog lies on its belly on a flat rock beside the porch, where the soapwort is in bloom. Up in the woods, the thrush sings a few bars and falls silent.
Out early to catch the coolness, such as it is. Sunlight filtered by atmospheric murk. A breeze riffling the walnut leaves. Ovenbirds, towhees and red-eyed vireos once again making their small claims.
Warm and humid with an occasional breeze. Mosquitoes are out in force, both large and small species, flying with disconcerting speed. I clap and clap.
Humid and cool. The ruby throat of a hummingbird shimmers in front of a hanging bandanna’s much blander red. From the other side of the house, the rising buzz of a cerulean warbler.