6:06 a.m. 50 degrees, wind NW 0 mph. Sky: light ground fog below sweeps of tattered clouds, pink blushed and silver-edged, brighter in the east; sunlight ignites the crown of the western ridge, two-F stops more brilliant than the valley below; a world just waking up. Permanent streams: upper, creeping current; if I hold my breath, I hear a trickle . . . taciturn like the neighbor up the road; lower, water reaches a point, which recedes daily, and then exits; the illusion of permanency. Wetlands: a soft mist slowly rises, vanishes; a morning dissolution; beyond the marsh, barred owl roosts in the wall of spruce; called through the night, an ebullient hoot flung haphazardly against the constellated sky. Pond: surface still, a suggestion of mist, slowly drifting nowhere. On the road: a sprinkle of basswood leaves, softly yellow and heart-shaped, like errant bits of sunlight.
A pair of tufted titmice on the side-yard crabapple pull webworms out of a tent. Jays and crows inherit the airwaves, loud, louder, loudest, ungovernable tongues. Overlooking the upper stream, a broad-wing hawk on a pine limb; flushes west over lower pasture; where the turkeys play. More red-breasted nuthatches, working limbs and trunks; tin horns ringing; sounds like a flock of migratory tricycles.
One pewee, repeatedly; the last of a half dozen neighborhood pewees, whistles; arrived in June, leaves in September; bookends the swim season; beauty tinged with sadness. Jordan, twenty-four, wavy brown hair swept back as though he just removed his hockey helmet, also leaves; heads to Boston this morning, the last of my short line of the boys to fledge. The unmarred melancholy of an exodus that bookends my years as a parent.