5:17 a.m. 57 degrees, wind NNE 1 mph. Sky: nothing to consider, thick, uniform skin of gray, wall to wall; not a highlight to be found. Male flowers of white ash everywhere, a great sweep of procreant energy, now spent; now, woodside litter. Ash, lagging behind all neighboring hardwoods, makes up for a slow start (as usual); then, all at once, an explosion of leaves and flowers. Baby ash leaves, daintily compound, take their time growing . . . still, the tree looks like a rice painting, each twig holding a perfect small bouquet, emerald green and lacey. A tree, like a mammal, with separate sexes. As a boy, playing on the sandlots of Long Island, I was under the spell of white ash; the only wood that ever spoke to me. Its pitch; its resonance. I lived for that sound. Sitting in the bleachers, at the Stadium, far from home plate, I held my breath whenever Mickey Mantle launched a baseball. Oh, such a distinctive crack. A chill-producing crack. White ash and white ash only. Who had ever heard of an aluminum baseball bat?
Mosquitos are here. Twenty years ago, when beaver ruled, a small legion of dead pine stood in the wetland, their boney, horizontal branches a perch for everything from bald eagle to kingbird; a dozen pairs of swallows nested out there. Mostly, tree swallows, maybe a rough-winged swallow or two. Today, only one tree stands, branchless . . . not a swallow to be seen. Note to self: put up swallow boxes . . . everywhere. Bead the wetland with boxes, a necklace of wood.
Fastidious and oblivious (at least of me), chickadee preens under a wing, held at a crooked angle. I stop to watch. Mosquitos stop to feed. Across the road, the chestnut-sided warbler sings in the black cherry, salutation to an unseen sun.
A large bird flies over the road. One flap, then another; and then sail, arrow straight through the heart of the flat- morning light. Gone in an eye-blink. It’s a pattern I know. A goshawk? Maybe yes. Maybe no. A palpable potential, however, as the potential to see a bobcat, a collateral gift from an already generous landscape.