Overcast and damp, with the intense green of new leaves everywhere. Two doves moan in different keys. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks down the road out of sight.
gray squirrel
April 29, 2025
Like a bear on a unicycle, the big tulip tree at the woods’ edge with its tiny, perfect leaves fluttering in the breeze. Three gray squirrels slowly spiral round its trunk.
April 24, 2025
Clear and cool at sunrise, with ovenbirds calling in the woods and a red-winged blackbird in the meadow. Two squirrels climb high into the canopy to taste the oak blossoms.
April 12, 2025
Cold and heavily overcast. A gray squirrel emerges from the woods like a ghost, seeming to float over the rain-darkened leaf duff, fur the color of the sky.
March 13, 2025
Red not where the sun rises but where the clouds are thin, off to the north. A silent crow takes a seat in the treetops. The thump of a squirrel falling to the forest floor.
March 9, 2025
Clear and still, despite the madness of clocks losing an hour. Woodpecker drums. A squirrel rummaging through last year’s leaves.
February 20, 2025
An hour after sunrise and the squirrels are mostly back in their burrows. Weak sunlight on a snowfall fine as flour. A mourning dove calls.
February 12, 2025
The slow fall of small snowflakes never quite stops. A squirrel with a half a tail bounds past, carrying his freshy disinterred breakfast: a black lump of frozen walnut.
January 30, 2025
Mostly clear and mostly quiet. A squirrel summits a 20-foot-tall stump and looks all about. The three small clouds turn red.
January 22, 2025
Two below zero, and at least two gray squirrels are in heat now. I watch a suitor bound over the snow and into the trees, leaping from the twiggy end of one limb to another, finding a way.
January 19, 2025
Snow starts in the gray dawn of a quiet Sunday, small flakes falling thickly, turning the road white again. Distant sirens. A squirrel crouches on a limb with its tail over its head.
January 16, 2025
Overcast, cold and still. A pair of amorous squirrels climb slowly up and down the trees at the woods’ edge. I take it on faith that the sun has risen.
January 12, 2025
Not far below freezing. The sun appears through a keyhole in the clouds. A gray squirrel reaches into the snow and extracts a black walnut.
January 11, 2025
A fresh inch of snow, fallen in the small hours, gives the wind new wings. A patch of sky turns salmon a bit to the south of where the sun usually comes up. A squirrel runs along the snow-free underside of a limb.