Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

August 15, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

6:07 a.m. 54 degrees, wind NW 2 mph. Sky: cloud curdled in the south with hints of mauve; ephemeral rubble. Transparent everywhere else. Very local ground fog. Permanent streams: upper, creeps to the finish line; lower, a barren channel, a hushed eulogy delivered by water-smoothed stones. Out of habit, I think of the stream as stable. The rock-studded bed, established long ago, grooved and scoured over millennia, but water, at least, flowing water this summer, in this valley . . . as scarce as a cerulean warbler. Wetlands: a single line of impoverished mist in the northwest corner; sunlight strokes the treetops, a bright green; the marsh, still shaded, colors saturated. Along the far shore, spruce and pine laden with cones; now, a feast for red squirrels; later, perhaps, for crossbills and siskins (if the cones supply up north collapses). Pond: a rolling salvo of fog going nowhere; short-lived like a mayfly, lifespan measured in moments; vanishes several feet above the surface, called home by dry air. Not precisely the world wide web (worm), but I add red maple and big-toothed aspen to my growing list of trees draped with silky tenements. Jewelweed going to seed, tiny and explosive. I touch the little green bananas and marvel at the discharge of seeds. Eat blackberries. Detonate jewelweed—the joys of walking at home.

Mid-August choral singers, a much-diminished ensemble: blue jays louder and sharper in the fresh, thin air; red-breasted nuthatches, many and noisy, tediously yanking; two red-eyed vireos on opposite sides of the road sing a summer salutation. Goldfinches; vocally subdued; catbird sulks in the alders; a yellow-billed cuckoo, attending an all-you-eat caterpillar buffet, swallows its voice. Red-shouldered hawk lances the morning, a long, piercing cry. Last week, a friend in East Thetford, photographed an immature red-shoulder cropping nest-bound robin chicks.

Four red maple leaves, blushing, a Dog-Day beacon, a timeless reminder of the tilt of the seasons: skies full of hawks; hillsides full of color; gardens full of basil. When I was a boy, every Sunday morning, I'd rush to the front door for The Sunday Times. Not so much for the Yankees' boxscore, which I did study with Talmudic devotion. I’d open the paper first to Hal Borland's essay, on the back page of the News and Review, each one short and pithy lifted a veil on the seasons. Once, Borland equated the sight of the first red of a swamp maple to a lit fuse that smoldered, and eventually ignited leaf by leaf, branch by branch, tree by tree, until entire hillsides and watersheds burst into otherworldly palettes of red, orange, yellow, and purple. Making a mockery of green.

This morning, I saw the fuse. Now, I wait for the blaze, that invigoration of color and activity, which marks autumn as one of New England's four most profound seasons.