Another Morning in Paradise

18 November 2024: Hurricane Hill (1,100 feet), White River Junction, Vermont

6:28 a.m. 37 degrees, wind North 2 miles per hour, gusting to 4. Overcast and damp, blue-gray and dull. The word bleak seems appropriate. Shortly after sunrise (6:48 a.m.), warm light in the east where the sun ought to be. A faint pink, very faint—without highlights and two or three stops brighter than middle-tone gray. Ansel Adams might have called the sky Zone VIII, possibly Zone IX (Zone X being pure white). Then, clouds in the east break into cottony tufts, rims ignited. Across the sky, the waning moon emerges from behind fracturing clouds, lacks a southeast corner, and shines like a new coin, an irrepressible brightness in a featureless sky before dissolving into daylight. Twelve species of birds, including red-tailed hawk (calling from the evergreen shoulder of the Hill), common raven (garrulous and loud), common crow (taciturn and tasteful), black-capped chickadees (many, many), and pine siskin (high in the hemlocks).

A flock of doves moves between neighborhood feeding stations, whistling wings ripping damp air. 

A barred owl on a telephone line considers me with her large eyes and irises brown as pitch. The owl kindles the morning (again), if not the sky.

Spins her head. Turns the morning magical. I pause. (What else can I do?) She watches me, watch her. Two species on a hillside, one hundred million years (or more) removed from a common ancestor. But it's not just the distant past that binds us to the tree of life; it's the now—together on a hillside, watching each other, breathing the same moist air while neighbors make coffee and tree frogs sleep below the fallen leaves.

The poetry of the moment: poised owl on an electric line, upright like me. Foward-facing eyes. Soft feathers stippled like tree bark. Razor talons and yellow beak, hooked.

Then, the owl takes off into the hemlocks—wings silent as the g in the word night.