5:18 a.m. 50 degrees, wind NE 0 mph. Stillness in the air. Sky: a broad, hazy peach-colored band across the south; blue-white and cloudless everywhere else; morphing by the moment; color drains and small clouds appear along the rim of the horizon. Permanent streams: slightly refreshed after yesterday morning's rain, have atrophied; puddle up; I need a stethoscope to see if they're still relevant. Morning is altogether bracing. Cool air holds mosquitos at bay and draws moisture into the air. Yesterday's rain transmutes to fog, which rises a third of the way up the trees along the far shore of the wetlands; higher to the west; tendrils in the east and south trace every crease and corrugation in the hillside, every scalloped ridge; called back by the sun. The world smokes as the morning ripens.
Late June: volume turned down on most songbirds. Tanagers hushed and invisible, not even a hint of scarlet in the oaks. Black and white warbler striped like a jailbird, paroled in the maples, silent as a fugitive. Three ovenbirds chase each other; no time to sing. A red-breasted nuthatch slowly repeats its tedious, nasal mantra. Pewee flies by, perches for a moment; then gone. Veery and hermit thrush, choral scholars, the exceptions this morning, sing like its May; elegance rising with the mist. Like gathering water in my hands I try to hold music that just seeps through me.
Chestnut-side warbler high in a cherry; yellowthroat midway up a fir. Their silence an implication that Earth has rotated away from the solstice, that defense of territory is less important than feeding nestlings, that the art of survival has discrete phases . . . we and they have entered another one. I want it all but satisfy myself with what I have . . . a morning like no other in late June.