6:56 a.m. 57 degrees (another warm dawn, another cricket nocturne, soft and dreamy), wind SSE 6 mph, the breath of the Carolinas. Sky: low cloud ceiling, nowhere for the heat to go, stays in place all night. Sun sneaks up, unnoticed behind a bank of clouds. Permanent and intermittent streams: without chronic evaporation flows holds steady; rendezvous with the marsh, a peaceful, joyful babble. Wetlands: dormant roots, reeds moribund shades of brown. Pond: male hooded merganser, decked in winter attire, swims away from me to the north end, constantly glancing over his back as if at any moment I might walk on water.
AOR: (dusk yesterday) Plump woodcock lands in front of me; orb head and whistling wings; knitting-needle bill. Stays for a moment then flies down the road; long, narrow wings stir the air, a silhouette in the dim light. Why leave when the earth is soft? (dawn today) Two robins flush. One lands on a flimsy, horizontal grapevine, a woodland teeter-totter, thinks the better of it and leaves, the vine bouncing like a springboard.
Scat on the road (SOR): mink, fresh. Dogs and I are interested in the same item, which still glistens. The last mink I saw in the valley was approximately fifteen years ago, a still nursing DOR female. She had given birth in a derelict beaver lodge, long abandon (by beavers), on the edge of the bank under a weft of hemlock. Like the otter, mink cross Coyote Hollow on an endless quest for food. When beavers were in residence, and food was sufficient, otter and mink took their coats off and stayed awhile.
The world awakens. Hairy woodpeckers and red-breasted nuthatches call in the dim light, everywhere. From the pines, behind the alders, a robin sings a soft, truncated version of spring song, almost a whisper . . . a renaissance that echoes the temperature, warm and springlike. Female yellowthroat in the goldenrods, yellow below, olive on top. Slow and deliberate. One of the first birds described in the Western Hemisphere. 1766, by Linnaeus. Except for myrtles, I don't often see Vermont warblers on the cusp of November, a Halloween bird, trick-or-treating in the wetlands. She could have arrived from Labrador or Newfoundland, on her way to the Everglades or Cuba or Panama. A lull in the Hollow to reset her thermostat.
And every morning, I have a serious choice . . . get out of bed and walk, or stay put in my COVID hermitage and miss life's pageant. My dogs, of course, have some say in this matter. The ease of each morning varies. But once outside, the door shutting behind me, I am rarely disappointed—a thousand lifelines, haphazardly and unpredictably, strewn across the valley. Every morning I grab one or two—distant goose, late yellowthroat, wary merganser. An itinerant mink leaves a token—the story of life, the story of time. The price of admission to the inclusive world beyond my doorstep . . . go outside. I belong here. Don't we all?