5:33 a.m. (sunrise four minutes later than July 23.) 64 degrees, wind S 5 mph. Sky: fog from two rivers rises merges, erasing distant outlines, blurring nearby contours. Where Moose Mountain ought to be, the sun ascends red-hot out of a diminished cloud. An ephemeral brushstroke electrifies the rim. Then, the sun turns pink, turns yellow, turns white—turns the eastern horizon rich with possibility. The fog thickens like cotton. Dewy sheet webs glisten. A juvenile bluebird, perched on an electric line, basks in the sunlight. Morning prevails.
Rain puddles dot the road, a slug tries to beat the sun to the other side. In a shallow wrinkle, below overarching ferns, water purls toward the river. Two juvenile woodpeckers, downy and sapsucker, share a gray birch that bends toward the ground. Probe old holes, one after the other. A diligent investigation. Woodpeckers look like toddlers. Act like toddlers, bump into each other, visibly careless, seemingly forgiving. Hermit thrush flits across the road and sings in the hemlock shade.
A sapling rises skeletal out of a knot of grapevines; hosts a waxwing, and then in succession: three bluebirds, two chipping sparrows, catbird, and phoebe, rhythmic tailing pumping. One bluebird returns, bill up, head back, swallows a small, green grape. Each replaces the other.
I hear chickadees and titmice and jays, see morning doves, and every afternoon a male cardinal flies across the yard, from maple to oak, a flash of red in an ocean of green; but thus far, all four avoid the feeders hung off the deck. The first bird to visit my avian foodbank was an immature male ruby-throated hummingbird (almost immediately after the sugar water went up). Now, four of five belligerent hummingbirds zip around the deck, chasing each other; jousting, bills like lances, poking, prodding, jabbing. The first bird on the sunflower feeder: male goldfinch. Second: dark-eyed junco, which dominates the goldfinch and nests eight feet off the ground, on a board on the underside of the deck alongside an empty robin's nest. Third: chipping sparrow, the lowest social standing on the three-species totem pole. For the moment, the feeders are theirs.
I stand on the deck, gazing down the slope of Hurricane Hill, northwest, through a green portal into my new neighborhood. Same world, different perspective. The forest floor, sun-dappled shadows like a fawn's coat. A sweep of hemlock boughs. A broad-winged hawk clutched to the spire of one hemlock, rocks in the southern breeze, an avatar of translocation—Vermont to Brazil, and back again—a biannual performance staged beneath a flotilla of clouds, above the scaffolding of the hemisphere. Makes my move from Thetford to White River seem relatively insignificant . . . but emotion runs heavier than feathers.
The birds are smoothing this transition--love the image of the hummingbirds "jousting" :-) It's good to see you're writing again, which always help frame feelings. I think of Granny McCoy in WV singing, "Make new friends, but keep the old/One is silver and the other gold." Not sure which color goes with the old/new, but both are valuable. And how incredible to have BOTH Thetford and now White River in your life. Shalom.