Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

November 13, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

6:37 a.m. 27 degrees, wind NWN 0 mph, feels like mid-November in Vermont. Sky: hung the birdfeeders before five, Venus rising in the east, Orion sinking in the west, in between the great smudgy sweep of our galaxy. By sunrise, clouds organizing themselves in the powder blue, mare's tails and cotton swaps, rose-tinted and luminous, a school of long, thin, fish-shaped clouds headed east, bright like spawning herring. Permanent streams: cold music, rocks damp and iceless. Wetlands: frost glazed, a deepening pool of cold air, feed by half-a-dozen spigots that channel Siberia down every crease in the hillsides, a bitter watershed made less bearable by this past week's glory . . . six days in the sixties and seventies. Across the reeds, astronomical bushels of pine cones, dangling. Check for crossbills the way I used to check the mid-marsh snag for hawks, now long gone. Nothing. Absence of crossbills: like a whale watch without whales, a hawk watch without hawks . . . then, it's all about your narration, tales of the land and sea. I begin a crossbill dialogue with myself: eleven races of red crossbills in North America, possibly eleven different species, each with a different bill-size and body-size, each with different evergreen preferences and geographic range. Each with a different call. Type 1, southern Appalachians, a vagabond, wanders widely in the East. Northeast, Types 1, 2, and 10, some years Type 3. Type 8, Newfoundland, a homebody. The rest out West (Type 6, Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico, wanders north into the Southwest; Type 11, southern Mexico and Nicaragua). Eastern Type 10 might actually be Type 7. Who knows? Not me. Quizzically and patiently, dogs look off into space. Pond: still, mist drifts southeast . . . unlike crossbills, which drift across the Northeast, cashing in on cones.

Red squirrel, sitting beside pine, eats a cone how we might eat a three-foot corn-on-the-cob, held in the palms of both hands. Happy squirrel spins cone. White-eyerings set off eyes as black as coal. A facial lamplight. Squirrel ignores me. Dogs, more interested in squirrel than crossbill pontification, stare.

Jay, the town crier, announces a new day. Nuthatches, both species, quiet as church mice. One downy woodpecker calls. Chickadees are conspicuous by silence. Or absence?

Sunlight spills down Robinson Hill, cold and bright. And, I pause to hear the jay proclaim the feeders full, and from all directions, they come. Squirrels, too.