I’ve been out at the lake before sunrise for the last several days.
The calendar may say it’s spring, but the heat and humidity say it’s summer.
At dawn the air is cool, scented with pinkster and sweet fern. Yesterday fog swirled above the lake surface; today there is a barely perceptible breeze.
I hear the frogs singing Oh Susannah. A catbird sings perched on a pine branch above me. Five male mallards swim as a group. I hear wood thrush and veery.
A group of frogs submerged in mud, except for their heads call in syncopated rhythm. Two leap out of the water, land in shallow weeds and disappear.
Mosquitoes hover just above the surface. And I think of Walter Dean Myers’s poem, Summer:
I like hot days, hot days
Sweat is what you got days
Bugs buzzin’ from cousin to cousin
Juices drippin
Runnin and rippin
Catch the one you love days Birds peepin
Old men sleepin
Lazy days, daises lay
Beaming and dreaming
of hot days, hot days
Sweat is what you got days
On the hike back, at what I call “half-way rock,” a large boulder set just off the trail, I notice a substantial scat pile that was not there when I hiked out. I wonder if it’s that little bear I saw last week.
I’ll be safely sheltered by the time the heat, humidity and thunderstorms develop. But it’s well worth getting up with the robins and cardinals to savor the start of this day.