Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

November 6, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

6:28 a.m. 46 degrees, wind SSE 4 mph, a Hoagy Carmichael and Ray Charles breeze . . . Georgia on My Mind. Sky: a rebellion of blue and gray, bruised but gorgeous, spitting rain. Half-an-hour later, the cloud ceiling shreds and opens in the west, long frayed fingers, wispy and curled, celestial bangs dangling through an open pale-purple rinse. Permanent streams: status quo flow minus snow (and ice). Wetlands: subdued light on the marsh; reeds motionless under gray-blue, opening by the moment. Pond: five hooded mergansers, three females and two first-year males, no longer confined by ice. Two of the ducks, wings aloft, rush across the surface. Airborne, they circle the pond twice and then pitch into the marsh; my two German shepherds and three remaining mergansers stare with bemused resignation at a world in flux. No sign of the mink, the otter, the snapping turtle, painted turtles, frogs, tadpoles, or blithely water-skating insects. Looks like November. Feels like May.

Pileated laughs at a private joke then passes through the open canopy, red crest swept back, a pterodactyl of bird, rising and sinking in joyous undulations, completely oblivious to absentee ballots. Three chickadees hang upside down from the ends of hemlock twigs, prying tiny seeds out of tiny cones . . . their specialized legs muscles, which permit dangling inversion, would impress Walter Payton or Bo Jackson. Maybe even Jim Brown.

In the neighborhood of acrobatic chickadees, a chorus of nuthatches, redder than white, blue jays, crows, and a trio of red squirrels chattering in the pines. One squirrel launches from maple to pine at a forty-five-degree angle, four limbs extended . . . similar to the nascent glide that an ancestral flying squirrel took more than thirty million years ago.

Chickadees, busily exercising their leg muscles, ignore the squirrel . . . a strategy we should use for political polls, which are as obsolete as bellbottoms.