Fleeting Riches

You need to be in place early if you want to know them in the fall, for after their initial
just-past-dawn sighs, they slip back into obscurity.
Brown thrashers are shy and hidden hunters, lurking furtively in the underbrush and rummaging in fallen leaves in search of prey.
They and the eastern towhees are the first morning voices this time of year and I am surrounded by “chucks” and “to-whees” as they awaken in the rose and bittersweet tangles at the edge of the woodlands.

A ways off, towards the river, bald eagles chortle from above and
wood ducks squeak from below, bookends on the marsh’s vertical space.
Near at hand, cardinals “chink” in the thickets and the white-throats, so exuberant at the newness of day, seem unable to contain their sweet song.
“Why?” I wonder, smiling at their lyrics. “O, Canada, Canada, Canada.”
(Or is it “Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody?”)

Autumn’s offerings are still obscured by the dimness, as the crows stealthily fly in from their night-time roost across the river. There will be time for bravado when the sun is fully up.
Birds, no more than silent shadows against a lightening sky begin to fly about, and near at hand, a hermit thrush softly announces his recent arrival.
“Welcome!” I whisper, wishing him rest and abundance during his winter residency.

Gradations-of-grey landscape gradually takes on color as the chorus crescendos
briefly, before dying away as abruptly as it began.
A pale crescent moon hangs in the morning sky, a shade somewhere between white and a soft yellow. What do you call that color – lighter than the blond clumps of Indiangrass and warmer than the cup-shaped spider webs, woven into the tips of the dried meadow stalks?
Even as I wonder, it becomes more faint.

Sweet gums stand in clusters, reminiscent of mottled pyramids in the neglected field, a mosaic of reds, yellows, oranges and purples.
The rough and grass-leaved goldenrods are browning, flowers finished and seed heads ripening, color that gardeners might think of as senescence but is, in fact, the promise of plenty.

Fingers and toes beginning to freeze, I turn towards home.
As the early singers’ songs have hushed, new voices take their place.
Flickers, downy woodpeckers and nuthatches have awakened and strike up their morning conversations. Pileated woodpeckers laugh in the distance.

Sunlight fully falls on coloring foliage in a scene transformed, missed in the darkness.
Gold of pawpaw and spicebush, silver of spiders’ silken strands drenched with dew, copper of pin oak and bronze of the dogwoods, ruby red rose-hips and sumac, emerald cedar and the delicate, fine white lace of frost asters.
Autumn treasures, richness of ephemeral wealth on this chilled and frosty morning.