Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

July 25, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

5:41 a.m. 57 delightful degrees; wind ESE 0 mph. Sky: who knows; atmosphere spreadable; congealed to a meringue thickness. Permanent streams: fill half their beds, speaking with a faint aqueous lilt. Wetlands: fog makes the marsh appear endless. Pond: surface taut and brown; if the otter's here, he'll have to send up a flare for me to find him. Bittern, standing on a mowed shoreline, faces away from the pond, bill to the sky; up to his old shenanigans; thinks I can't see him. I let him believe what he wants. Joe-Pye-weed blooms and black-eyed Susan fades. And the immediate world, strung with dewy spiderwebs, glistens.

DOR: fresh pine cone, scales removed by a red squirrel and scattered, seeds ate; what's left looks like a scrawny corn-cob or a naked squirrel tail.

AOR: robin thrashing a small, hapless frog; maybe a peeper. If efts, which wander with impunity, were not neon orange and toxic, there would not be any left.

Feeder freeloaders: chickadees, doves, jays, purple finches, and goldfinches.

Beyond the feeders: the morning belongs to red-eyed vireos, vinyl records run-a-muck; everything whispers and suggestions. A tanager. An ovenbird. Three phoebes chasing each other. A pileated hollers. A house wren. A catbird sings a convoluted ensemble, reminiscent of the thickets behind Jones Beach and Fire Island primary dunes, a watershed, a sound, and an island away. Pewee needs to be more upbeat. A lot of robins. Summer ripens.

Last night, I watched the comet (I hate the name) from the bridge over the outflow from Lake Fairlee. A crescent moon sunk behind Gove Hill. Jupiter and its troop of satellites rose in the southeast. Comet appeared midway below the Big Dipper's ladle, a wooly core with a million-mile debris trail, a cosmic dust bunny stretched across an unfathomable distance. An ego stabilizer from the dawn of the universe. 

An owl hooted. A loon wailed. And I leaned on the warm hood of my car humbled by the illusion of distance and the tragedy of time. Humbled by the beauty of things . . . a freeloader, much like the birds at my feeder.