Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

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

6:33 a.m. 52 degrees, wind SSE 0 mph. Sky: fog-filled at the beginning of the walk; fog-filled at the end; thick enough for leaves to drip. Wetlands: inside, mystery encased in vapor; outside, a flock of twenty or more chickadees moves in a leisurely southward drift through the alders and red maples, into the hemlocks; pausing for a moment to feed and call; but mostly on moving. I stand listening to the last fading dee, dee. Maybe chickadees are irrupting. An evacuation of the Northeast? Every few years, they'd appear on the Long Island dunes, enlivening beach plum and bayberries with their antics. Pond: unrippled, a hint of mist; water level, a daily retreat, leaves behind a blank page of mud scrawled with mammal calligraphy, mostly raccoon; almost human handprints in decorative opposition to the long and wide, deeply clawed tracks of the hind feet. Three white-throated sparrows along the berm keep quiet and to themselves. In full transition: Color three weeks ahead of 2017 (a chromatic match from a series of cellphone pix).

AOR: full-grown eft, engaged in its version of chromatic transition, an interplay between orange and olive, on the way home to the marsh to become a newt; a slow-motion migration. I escort the eft off the road.

Early morning ensemble: crow in the pines, wooden knocking call; hairy woodpecker metronomic taps on maple limb, paces the sunrise; brooding catbird, somewhere in the thickets, kvetches; white-throated sparrows, both white crown-striped and tan crown-striped work dry streambed, snippets of a song; juncos; a pair of brown creepers, thinnest of thin notes, now you hear it, now you don't . . . seee, seee, seee. The red-shouldered hawk doesn't shriek; it swears; tight on a limb, robed in fog, waits for the sun.  

Hermit thrush, as mute as a molasses, flips leaves and then poses on a branch, a dull red tail, listless against the foliar tide of crimson and vermillion. I want the thrush to sing, to fill the morning with ethereal music. I wait and watch it bathe in rich, red shade—no song, not today, just the hushed valor of migration.