May 16: Maple shower

I looked out the back window a minute ago and stopped in my tracks. Big drops were falling. Was it raining? Snowing? Are those drops yellow? Stymied, and worried about my eyes, I stepped out the front door. Nothing was falling on the front walk. Around back, however, those strange drops, still falling. A very localized storm, apparently. And quiet. As I walked under the big maple, the drops began to fall softly onto my shirt: a shower of yellow maple flowers, scattered by a warm breeze.

Maple showers flowers
all over the uncut lawn,
celebrating its greening.

May 15: Ducktrap River Preserve

Led a bird walk this morning on the Ducktrap River Preserve in Lincolnville. While watching warblers forage in the poplars along the edge of a restored gravel pit, we heard a Scarlet Tanager singing in the distance, that raspy melody distinctive despite the trees between us and the bird. Further up the trail in the hemlock grove, two Barred Owls flew together from tree to tree, hooting like crazed monkeys, particularly delighting the little boy who'd joined our group. And down by the river, the long, bubbling, buzzy song of the tiny Winter Wren tells us of the stone walls winding through the woods, marking boundaries of former fields.

Trees where fields once were.
Across the green distance
red tanager sings.

May 14: Vultures aloft

Emd of day: clouds roll in.
High over the mountain
eight vultures soaring.

May 13: Sunset

Home from the pizza place.

Sunset's pink reflection

flowing downriver.

Posted with Blogsy

May 12: After the rain

The rain prevented my mother and I from taking a post-Mother's Day brunch walk this morning, but it stopped in time for my husband and I to get in a pre-dinner walk this evening. As we walked around the neighborhood, each house gave off its own odor: woodsmoke from those trying to take the edge off the evening chill; cigarette smoke from some; the scent of damp crabapple blossoms from others; and the fragrance of mown grass from many.

Wet, scattered petals
and sodden clumps of cut grass.
The calm of settling dusk.

May 11: Wave

After the rain stopped late this morning, dozens of migrating birds moved through the trees in our back yard. I stood on the violet-dappled lawn and watched them for almost two hours as they flitted and fed in the new leaves above the river. Yellow-rumped Warblers were the most numerous and least shy, often flying very near me and posing very visibly. The chorus of the songs of all those birds rose to a cacophony at the peak of the wave. I let the sound wash over me as I followed each movement in the trees with my binoculars.

Heard again after a year--
Magnolia Warbler's sweet song
rises from the chorus.

May 10: Greening

A couple of days of rain and mist, and the trees in our backyard have really greened up and leafed out.

Much-needed rain falls.
Yard becomes a leafy stage
through which one crow flies.

May 9: Massage

I got a much-needed, very rigorous deep tissue massage this afternoon at Beauty Mark Day Spa, and walked out the door afterward, into the foggy spring evening, feeling sore and a bit dazed.

After the massage,
fog blanketed my shoulders,
a weightless burden.

May 8: Pastoral

Crow calmly grazes,
surrounded by dandelions
in the green grass.

May 6: Afternoon song

Soothing, somehow--
breeze through the screen,
robin's rollicking, sunlit song.

May 5: Alewives

A friend and I visited the historic fish ladder in Damariscotta Mills this morning at high tide and then again this afternoon at low tide. We were mesmerized by the undulating masses of thousands of fish, as they struggled past the gauntlet of gulls up the watery staircase and through a mill pond to eventually reach their spawning grounds in Damariscotta Lake.

Alewives head upstream
in swirling fin mandalas--
oh, to be that sure.

Self-portrait with fish