6:40 a.m., minutes before sunrise, but you'd never know it. 68 degrees, wind SSE 11 mph. Sky: gray, cloud-crowded and pouring, a joint enterprise between Earth and sky; a reason to celebrate; an all-night deluge, I smell pine and moldering leaves; an umbrella and raincoat aren't enough. Intermittent streams: resurrected, flowing with authority. Permanent streams: upper, recipient of road runoff, roaring, an earthy brown; lower, full and loud, rocks scoured, washed bare, reamed leaves gather in the marsh, insulation for a snapping turtle, water, more transparent than the upper stream, churns and foams. Wetlands: a receiving sponge; no visible standing water but the thread of reeds in the main channel look greener. Pond: water level up, halfway to the spring shoreline; leaf islands and archipelagos dispersed, destroyed, deposited; racing wind ruffles surface, a mesmerizing interplay of light and raindrops.
Leaf attrition, more on the ground than in the trees; a Jackson Pollack speckling of the road, mostly yellow. Maple has had its moment; late to the floral pageant, aspen, oak, and beech still primarily green. Trees on the western ridge two F-stops darker than yesterday; color drains, leaves fall: Brown, the new orange.
Yesterday, walking the backroads of Pomfret, virtually every sugar maple leaf was perforated, neat round holes of maple-leaf cutters, a tiny, leaf-hungry caterpillar, as though someone went crazy with hole-puncher. A little caterpillar makes a leaf sandwich and hides inside. Some leaves looked like colanders. Maple sandwiches peppered the road, pairs of round, green cutouts held together by caterpillar silk, blanket and a mattress. In Coyote Hollow, sugar maple leaves are mostly pristine. Very few perforations, one in a yellow birch. In Vershire, a friend tells me, maple sandwiches are everywhere in her woods, too; for more than a week, she's watched yellow-rumped warbles bang open fallen sandwiches and eat the caterpillars. Yellow-rumps feast; Neotropical warblers clear out. A patch-work of caterpillars; yellow-rumps there for the harvest.
Like Gene Kelly, one blue jay, not burdened by a lack of self-regard, it’s tongue ungovernable, singing in the rain. Three chickadees join in . . . a celebration, a long time coming.