6:00 a.m. 46 degrees, wind E 0 mph. Sky: pastel-pink brush stroke in the west, otherwise white or blue and cloudless; ground fog; a valley of dew. Permanent streams: upper, steady, shallow flow, evaporation not taking a severe toll; lower, flows to within twenty yards of the marsh, then retreats underground, a surface evacuation that leaves behind damp earth and slippery rocks. Wetlands: a bowl of dissipating mist; hazy treeline, opaque colors. Blue and yellow-striped hot-air balloon above the marsh; burner off, sailboat silence (bits of conversation floats down); burner on, oceanliner tumult; mid-balloon, thick black stripe with yellow letters, big enough to read from the ground: SPAM.
Pond: drifting mist: unknown surface disturbance: ripples and bubbles.
Red squirrels persevere; a constant rain of pinecones bounces on the road and limbs, splashes through leafy sieves. Dogs alert (and confused). Pinecones land all around us, dull green with a veneer of sap. Squirrels too busy to chatter; move through treetops like wraiths . . . could easily replace industrious ants in an Aesop Fable. I'm not sure who could replace the grasshopper, possibly me. I still have wood to stack and lawn to mow and garden to harvest and . . .
Red-breasted nuthatch stopover, again. Small groups scattered in the hardwoods and pines. Move through the canopy, across the horizontal limbs, a lusty tin horn serenade. Warblers keep to themselves. But small flocks of chickadees, quietly dee, dee, deeing. Three on the lip of the marsh; move, eye level, shrub to shrub; hang upside down tweezing alder seeds from cone clusters. Pluck and go.
An altogether quiet morning. Chilled crickets are barely audible. No pewee. No red-eyed vireo. No bat behind the barn door. Having shaken off a night of torpor, a male hummingbird arrives on the feeder, hovers, feeds rapaciously, fattening up for a miraculous adventure. Weighs less than a nickel and flies non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico. A summer farewell, like the last blackberry, soon to withdraw . . . off into the velvet night.