5:12 a.m. 58 degrees, wind N 0 mph. Refreshingly cool. Sky: cloud-blotched and light-flecked, infused with a rose wash across the south; a waxing moon, nearly full, as rose-colored as the southern sky, sinks toward Ohio. Wetlands: lush and vivid, a well-watered bowl of wild green; a green frog twangs. Pond: a hint of mist, faintest possible hint. Deer flies and mosquitos, taking too many chances, must be starving. Woodpecker pounds a metal roof. Along the road: Timothy, a common non-native grass blooms; a terminal cylinder of tightly packed flowers; frilly anthers extend and droop, wait for a breeze; accents of ox-eye daisy and Black-eyed Susan, what my boys grew up calling Black-eyed Aunt Susan, in honor of their aunt; flowering red raspberry fades, petals have had enough.
A house wren takes off vocally, a differing rendition of trills, rattles, and tempos. Like Dylan singing Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat, the wren thrives on variation, changes his pace from Smith-Corona to Browning machine gun. Sweet, liquid whispers of a hermit thrush emerge from a vocal eclipse of ovenbirds and red-eyed videos. Two veeries spiraling descent, like running your finger down the keys of a cosmic piano.
Thankfully, red-eyed vireos are not nocturnal. A Cape Cod friend, who lived among the oaks of Brewster, left his bedroom windows open when he had insomnia to count whip-poor-wills. A milestone in the annals of divine patience, John tallied twelve hundred whip-poor-wills once before falling asleep. If vireoes sang in the dark, I'd take medication.
A single yellow-billed cuckoo, somewhere along the northern edge of the wetlands. Third day in a row. A run of well-spaced, hollow coo, coo, coo. Melancholy, I turn to the cuckoo.
My barn cat disappeared last week, vanished into the landscape that had cradled him. A nondiscriminating killer, he took too many birds, most recently a phoebe, most often a mourning dove or a junco. Once, a sapsucker. Although disappointed, I forgave him for each bird. He also killed uncountable numbers of mice and chipmunks, the grim executioner that played with food. I adopted the cat eight years ago because of rodents, their eyelids peppered with larval black-legged ticks. I reasoned, a cat, a front line against Lyme disease, was better than spraying pesticides. Whenever I sat in a lawn chair, he climbed aboard, soft and gray, and purring. I named him Roberto after the great Pittsburgh right fielder; oblivious to his name, Roberto came when I meowed. Each morning, Roberto joined the dogs and me. He'd journey a couple of hundred yards and then turn back into a tangle of briars . . . disappeared. Roberto was the epitome of cautiousness and stealth. He grew up with the dogs, with which he maintained vestigial relationships. Played with them, was treed by them a hundred times. Roberto stood straight up and left his logo on soft-barked trees like ash, each with a full and complex skirt of claw-marks. He maintained beds in the barn and garage and a summer home in the culvert beneath the driveway. Roberto never entered the house. He was an outside cat, a barn cat, now gone. Roberto had hunted with grim determination, and (very likely) had become the victim himself, having slid down the same dark hole as generations of small rodents (and one sleek weasel).
For all his shyness, the cuckoo reminds me it's a new morning.