Spot o' Sun

Winter Wrap-up

I’ve become a lot like my cats—
watching the world from a window,
waiting for a spot o’ sun.

Northern cardinal, male
Snow Day

mourning dove in winter

purple finch, female
Ice Storm

purple finch, male

white-throated sparrow

Spot o' Sun
American goldfinch, male

white-tailed deer

Buckeye Birds

Northern Cardinal, female
in snow

A small tree stands just beyond my back-facing window.
As it grows steadily, taller every year, I’ve come to realize that this lanky specimen brought proudly home from school by my fourth-grader over 15 years ago, is much like the long-legged, hungry puppy, whose large feet hint at its future size while it waits, wagging--innocently asking for a home.
It’s an Ohio Buckeye—our state tree. And although the woods edging our property contain an assortment of others—pin and shingle oaks, shagbark and pignut hickories, sycamore, honey locust, sugar, red and silver maples, black cherry, white pine and spruce—the buckeye wasn’t here. The small tree with the broad palmate leaves and the beautifully doe-eyed fruit was missing from the woods of our new Ohio home.
So I planted it where all could see—the short, spindly stem with four huge, 9-inch leaves, just beyond my back-facing window.

Northern Cardinal, male and female
in Ohio Buckeye

Now, approaching 15 feet in height, I wish I had planted it further than the 8 feet it stands from our house at the woods’ edge. But its closeness brings the birds to our backdoor. In the spring, its sweet, tubular flowers in tall pyramids of pale yellow attract hummingbirds to sip its nectar. And, with leaves fallen through the winter months, its slender horizontal branches fill with feeder birds, dashing in to snag a sunflower seed or darting down beneath it, foraging from the snow-covered ground.
These are my Buckeye Birds.

White-breasted Nuthatch

Carolina Chickadee

Song Sparrow

American Goldfinch

Blue Jay

Northern Cardinal

And in the Bower, Birds

Laid round bare shoulders, winter white,
a veil, with diamonds dripping,
she steps slowly forward.
All stand.
And in the bower, birds.

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From my Window, White (SWF)

The Woods Beyond my Window

From my window, I look out over the yard, through the Hawthorn just feet beyond the house, and into the woods sloping gently down to a small creek. Watching, from over the screen of my laptop, and behind glass, the lives drawn to this edge each morning.

Often, they flow past unnoticed.
Into the rusty browns of the fallen oak hickory woods and slender gray stems of the graceful young trees filling the understory, they step into invisibility. Without movement, added to this tapestry—
in the softened tones and textures of a woven winter wood.





Until I wake on a snowy morning like this,
and find the darkness brighter.
The Hawthorn filled with forms,
plumped and fluffed against a white cold.

American Golfinch, Carduelis tristis

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