5:21 a.m. 53 degrees, wind N 0 mph. Sky: mottled and highlighted, a whiter shade of pink, the pink of Caucasian flesh; eventually, long fingers of sunlight extent beyond the crown of Robinson Hill, the incarnation of a Watchtower cover. Upper permanent stream struggles to flow; not a murmur. Lower a wreckage of a stream. National Weather Service calls this "moderate drought." Somewhere to the west, the legacy of rain looms. Wetlands more a haze than a mist. Light fog rolls off the pond; goes nowhere.
Most birds call rather than sing, except for wearisome red-eyed vireoes, which sing like they just arrived. One very loud ovenbird. A robin, the tip of its yellow bill stained brown, runs across the road, just ahead of the dogs. A veery on a broken aspen limb tilts his head back slightly and sings a duet with himself; an elegant cascade of a song like rushing water. Sings. Looks at me. Sings. Looks at me. Sings, again and again, and again. An echo of an echo. A bird I often hear but don't often see. Veery has had enough; flies away, leaves me wanting more.
A milk-snake skin in the stonewall, a sleeve of itself turned inside out. Late one April, while precariously balancing on a step ladder pruning apple trees, a milk snake (maybe this one) slithered out of a mole tunnel into daylight. Like the scene from Emily Dickenson’s poem, A Narrow Fellow in the Grass, but without the factor of fear.
The grass divides as with a comb . . .
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing . . .
The snake felt cold, and I assumed that she had wintered in the tunnel, somewhere below the frost line, and had just emerged for the season. She summers in the stonewall with a couple of garter snakes, where she sheds once, maybe twice, each growing season. She lays her oblong, leathery eggs in the compost pile. In September, a dozen snakelets, brick-red hourglasses on gray backgrounds, rubbery and delicate, radiate from the compost pile, sometimes across the front lawn. When I see one, I'm joyous. Small snakes eat slugs. Big snakes eat white-footed mice and chipmunks, the two most important reservoir hosts of Lyme disease. Milk snakes advance through the tightness of the stonewall. For a chipmunk, there's no place to hide. For me, notwithstanding the brilliance of Dickenson, there is no And Zero at the Bone.