5:03 a.m. 62 degrees, wind SW 1 mph. Sky: overcome with moisture, slight openings in the east; in the west, a merger of clouds, fog, and mist. Permanent streams: fuller and louder but nowhere near capacity. Intermittent streams creep toward their destiny. Wetlands: a shroud of mist; challenging to see upper branches on the far shoreline, where the hawk surveils. Pond surface: untarnished by the wind; mist rises straight up, thickening the air like corn starch thickening a soup. Dripping leaves sound like rain. Clusters of ox-eyed daisies brighten the roadside.
DOR: two red efts
AOR: answering humidity's call, two red efts and one millipede in a hurry; legs in waves of motion like prairie grasses against a wind. One slug drags westward.
Listening to a red-eyed vireo's inexhaustible song, when all other species have either turned down the volume or gone mute, is like shopping in Macy's, a seasonal undercurrent of tedium, treetop Musak. In a month, when the woods fall silent except for the odd cuckoo and pewee, I'll reconsider the vireo. A rose-breasted grosbeak, full of beans, sings like he just got here from the Neotropics, a musical landscape of rich phrases that put everything else in the background, even a vireo. A hapless and bedraggled chestnut-sided warbler chips repeatedly. Songbirds rarely look good when wet.
Two does, not far off the road, bright rufous in dim light, watch me watch them. Two dogs, tensely watching, leashes as taut as cables, not sure what to do; watch the deer watch me watch them, a moment of indecision on all fronts. Anticipation like fog thick enough to slice. Deer bolt. Leashes slacken.
Today's my parents' anniversary. They married in the decade King Kong was released. If Betty and Mel were alive, my mother would be a hundred ten, my father a hundred five, and they'd still wonder (no doubt) why I left the Bronx Zoo forty-six years ago for a life of rural splendor and economic struggle. Maybe, now that we're in an Age where hyphens join words never before united—self-isolation, social-distancing, and my favorite new-normal—they'd understand I'm where I need to be, where I was born to be—quarantining in Vermont.