Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

July 22, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

5:24 a.m. 60 degrees, wind SE 0 mph, an invigorating and breathless sunrise. Sky: a crowd of malleable clouds; swirls and layers; blue-gray with bright rims and shifting hints of mauve; a dynamic and mesmerizing Rorschach test. Last evening, I watched a cloud evanesce, become a trace of itself, and then dissolve into twilight like an Alkaselzer tablet in a glass of water. Permanent streams: wait for rain (like everything else); unhurried and lulled; losing ground to drought by the hour. Wetlands: lusciously green; a suggestion of mist; across the marsh and far up the western flank, a hermit thrush angelically vitalizes the morning; a green frog, in need of tuning, joins in. Pond: threads of exfoliating vapor quickly vanish; part of the cycle of water. Another critical part, rain, remains a promise. I want something morning than a thunderstorm . . . a classic and vitalizing soak. (Something my driveway can handle.)

A pair of unhurried robins, pecking and picking, lead me down the driveway. Overhead, high in an oak, tanager rains down his long, raspy-phrased song, not nearly as colorful as his plumage. Ovenbird silent. Alder flycatcher silent. Chestnut-sided warbler silent. Yellowthroat silent. The list goes on . . . and on. Mnemonically, a pewee whistle, signals the next phase; insect chorus replaces bird chorus. Predominant woodland minstrels are crickets; grasshoppers; dog day harvest flies, big and green and popeyed, a high-whining, electronic buzz that overwhelms an afternoon stroll. I imagine I'd need headphones to endure chorusing seventeen-year cicadas. 

Two red-shouldered hawks screech. Then, one after the other, pass overhead, just above the green archway, still screaming. On view for a nanosecond, their voices lagging behind them.

Last night, after ten o'clock, I stood on the bridge over the outlet of Lake Fairlee and watched comet Neowise, low in the northwest. Below the bottom lefthand star of the Bigger Dipper. A smudge in an unmarred emptiness, a fuzzball with a broad, dimly lit squirrels' tail. Headed west toward Colorado, toward Casey and Becky. I watched the comet and thought of them, on the verge of Colorado National Monument; their home sky star-spangled and dark as my cellar. Comet-perfect like a Vermont night. Comet last passed this way 6,800 years ago, just after the discovery of cheese. Back then, lions lived in England; leopards in Greece; steppe bison in Alaska; dwarf mammoths on Wangle Island; jaguars in Florida; miniature elephants on Mediterranian isles; ground sloths in Cuba. Hawaii was an unpeopled island chain; the Everglades underwater. Fresh from glacial refuges off the Carolina Coast, rattlesnakes returned to the Northeast. Back then, no one rode a horse or ate rice.  

So much happened in 6,800 years . . . a geologic flicker. So much happened in four months, a deplorable misstep.

Where are the three men on camels?