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Morning's softening influence has calmed the wind but sustains the rain. Millions of chilly drops of water sprinkle moderately down on the greening grass, the blossoming trees, the bare rock of the quarry cliffs, the ringnecks in the pond. It's a springtime rain, an April shower, a promise in the making.
The rain has smoothed over imperfections in the driveway, has rinsed clean the awakening lawn. It's also flushed out a few earthworms -- I suspect, in fact, that disgorged worms is the reason a handful of herring gulls have collected in a yard down the road. The ringnecks soak it up, meantime. Ducks do love this weather. A black duck, too, visits the pond at midday. I wonder about the black ducks -- nesters every year -- and what spot they've settled on this spring. I wonder, but I don't want to know. All day: chill rain. But come evening, a scrap of blue appears in the northwest sky. And the blue stripe spreads irrepressibly southwestward. And just before it sets, the sun emerges and floods the eastern view with orange light that creates a sort of autumn mirage as it brightens the new leaves of the streetside hardwoods in town. To the south, the tip of the Knox County courthouse is a flash of white in the distance; the flat-roofed high school lies in shadows nearer by. In the west, in dying daylight, the sky erupts in a complex, lovely pattern of lightness and dimness, of sun-limned cloud and blue. And after dark, standing in the dooryard, I grab a happy whiff of a world rinsed clean by spring. |
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| Bird Report is a discursive daily record of what's outside my high north window in Rockland, Maine, USA (44°07'N latitude, 69°07'W longitude). --Brian Willson | |||||
©1998 by 3IP |