After a week of soupy humidity and torrential rains, the atmosphere lifted and clear cool wind started pouring in. Yesterday was incredibly clear and it was like you were on acid, like you couldn’t believe everything was so special, so green, so clearly defined as being alive. It lifted everything, everyone’s spirits felt so light, so free from water, from the closeness and density of millions of microscopic water droplets crowding your skin, your thoughts.

This is the thick of summer: the tomato plants are like a science project gone awry, they climb everywhere, and tomatoes hang pendulously, but still green, with the promise of food to come. A huge bell pepper hangs, and you can’t help but to be afraid for it’s well being, hoping a chipmunk won’t take a bite and ruin the few weeks of waiting. Hurricanes come in without a moment's notice, whip things into a frenzy, and leave just as suddenly.

I walked down to the pond and sat on the bench, the breeze cool and noticed the water level was up. It poured this week. I was scanning the edges of the water and saw an egret, which I’ve never seen here, so I ran back inside to grab the binoculars. It was beautiful to watch, all white, pristine incredible white, with dull yellow legs and a black beak. Around it a few female mallards circled and seemed to want to harass it. It jumped up off its perch and landed on a dead tree that has fallen and hangs over and in the water. I noticed now that a few green herons were also perched close by, and then the mallards came into view right behind the egret and I noticed how small it was, how delicate and streamlined, compared to the plump ducks. The purple loosestrife kept blowing into my view, and as I tried to keep my eye on the egret, it turned into a beautiful painting, the purple, the striking white, and the lush green backdrop. You start to take green for granted these days.

In a minute it all changed, as the mallards nudged the egret into flight. I watched as it flew higher and farther, getting smaller in the distance, until it seemed an updraft had caught a piece of paper, which had fluttered away and disappeared.

The high pitched laughing scream of the Pileated Woodpecker makes for goose-pimpled flesh. The grating annoying cackle of Woody Woodpecker is based on it. The real thing is so different, so frightening.
Seeing them is a total treat. The are big and so punk rock with their red brushed back mohawk. Their beak is long, and their head seems small. Their neck is a strange apostrophe that connects the two.

One day I was hiking in Rosendale and I found a pile of feathers and bones. The tell tale beak of the pileated was there, its black and white feathers, its large rib cage ripped asunder---but one thing was missing: no red feathers. Did the predator or scavenger eat the whole head? And spit out the beak only? Could it have been a Hairy Woodpecker? Maybe some little chipmunk coveted the red feathers for its mossy little den...

This morning a very exciting thing happened. I was having coffee and outside the birds began to kick up a racket, sounding like a huge bird fight. I tried to see what it was, but it seemed to be over the little ridge to the pond. I looked away and then looked out again, hearing the chatter intensify and out pops a coyote! In a second he ran towards the neighbors property. I ran outside and caught a glimpse of him running away.

It’s easy to forget the winter when in the middle of summer all the trees are full and green, lazily being blown by hot breezes as dragonflies buzz through the air in doubled up mating pairs. The water in the pond is getting thick and low, and when we canoed to the middle of it the other day we spotted something big and round bobbing in the water, choked by lilies. As we got closer we noticed the telltale flies; it was a dead and bloated snapping turtle, as big as a large serving tray, his carapace covered with thick black-green algae. I used my oar to lift his head, the eyes turned to a white blue, his strong jaws closed and leaking mille-foil plants.

You forget how much death there is in the summer: the broad winged turkey vultures have their pick, circling under the light cirrous clouds, never flapping, but slowly, insidiously hovering without exertion. There is so much surplus that they seem to leave the road kill to the opportunist crows, and instead take their meals on the more delectable slow deaths, in the forest, or in the field. The left-overs of predators and raptors.

I was thinking back to February: how every day in the dead of winter, when the sun would drop out of sight at 4ish and the mornings were cold and brutal, every day we would eat lunch on the enclosed porch of the winery that has a long row of tall windows that open up a view of the distant and small Marlboro Mountains. The sun would already be on its descent by 1pm and we would squint over stew and bread, and wonder what the glint was on the top of the hill so far away. One day the UPS man told us, it’s a home, I’ve been there, a really nice home, and we thought greedily, enviously, of owning a home that has a view of the real mountains behind us that they must have a view of. A house that’s big and has two stories, and many acres and dogs and big windows that reflect the sun like a big beacon on the Hudson.

One of the things that we would look forward to was the Northern Harrier. We like to say his name in an English accent, so Harrier sounds like Harriah, the r’s rolling on our tongue. It took us a while to figure out who he was, as we are novices, but we persevered and scoured our Sibley’s bible and narrowed it down to the harrier by noticing the white patch on his rump that shows when he flies, between tail and back. He’s called the marsh hawk, and his rufous chest belied his youth. A juvenile, says our guide. As we would eat, he would eat, skimming the dead fields for mice or voles, the winter hours encroaching. He was reliable as my stomach, always hungry when we were hungry for lunch.

Now we don't see him anymore as he probably has better places to feed, or perhaps he went north. No one seems to feed on the fields that are now choked with loosestrife, brambles and different kinds of grasses. Under those billowing weeds are lots of little families of rodentia, prospering and safe.

Yesterday we sat out on a blanket trying to both forget and remember our lives at the same time. Usually it's by drink, but today it was by fiction. We were reading. That fiction is just as bad came to mind: sucking me in, soul obliterationg, just one more chapter please, or until I pass out in sleep, until it's too much and the words blur and jump off the page and I can't take it and have to look away.

The sun was setting, and the straw-like grass of summer, undernourished itself, was poking up through the thin dirty sheet we sat on. We wanted to eat but there was nothing but crackers, and we wanted to drink, but we only had water. The fiction was pulling us under like a water bound beast, and we decided not to jump in anymore, not even to wade, as it was becoming too dangerous.

And so we looked up at the tree, the dead one at the edge of the marsh which is covered in poison ivy and grape weed. The top branches that jut like skeleton fingers out of the bushy poison vines are in the last sun of the day, and sitting there are five green herons, now six, now eight. They sit like hunched monks soaking in the sun, squawking their high pitched shreiks every so often, rearranging iridescent purple feathers, hopping to lower or higher branches, stretching their brown and white, striped and speckled necks, looking like ladies trying on exotic feathered gloves, making that sound, that odd sound that only they make, a cross between a yawn and the croak of the green frog.

As slowly, and as deliberately, and as randomly as they landed, they just the same started to lift their tightly folded wings, stir the air and fly away, leaving us alone in the twilight, wanting to be with them, wanting to be them, wanting to eat frogs, and stay still for hours on end, wanting to have necks like ladies' thin long wrists, wanting to have what seems like effortless lives, wanting to fly.