Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

December 3, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

6:55 a.m. 25 degrees, wind E 1 mph (feels like early December in Vermont). Sky: adoringly, I stare at the waning moon, low in the west, bright and white like a chipped aspirin. (Dogs confused. Too early in the walk to be idling.) Moon dominates a cloudless sky. Sun's preamble: hints of peach in the east. Leaf-litter and shingled roofs snow-dusted, granular and sparse. Carpet of frozen leaves, brittle and loud, crunching underfoot. Permanent streams: I watch and listen to rolling water far in the woods, looks like a black racer with sinuous curls and one lull, wide and shallow, the bolus in the belly of an imaginary snake. Wetlands: peach-colored clouds, born in the southwest, drift north below the moon. Burnished marsh, white with frost. Pond: frozen, again, the third time. Feathery panes linked by clear ice, the jigsaw stage. Where the stream enters, a single tongue of dark water, black as a sable. 

A hushed sunrise, but for the monotonous honking of nuthatches and a lone blue jay, a felonious feeder bird spills more seeds than he eats. An incoming tide of gray squirrels and two turkeys glean what the jay scatters.

A friend sent me a climate change article from ProPublica that said by mid-century, Missouri will feel like Louisiana, hot and humid. Lousiana, what's not already under the incoming Gulf, will feel like the Neotropics. Humidity will spread northward, along with mosquitos and ticks and hookworm, heartworm, scabies, rabies, heatstroke, and refugees of drowned coastlines.

And, then, he wrote, Vermont . . . so hot and humid you can’t sweat in a nightmare.