TYPE: FIELD NOTE / REFLECTION

DATE / LOCATION:
Sunday, May 24, 2026 — about 9:30 AM. Memorial Day weekend. The Upper Watch, The Place.

This page belongs to the COLUMN record because the morning was carried by weather and sound: southeast wind, wet cloud, bird chorus, and a pair of loons coming into view while the thought was still forming.

By 9:30 I had already been to town for supplies and was finishing coffee at the Upper Watch before going back to straighten up the barn.

It was still cloudy, though not as gray as the evening before. It had rained off and on through the night and seemed to have given the ground a decent soaking. The temperature was around 48 or 50 degrees. The wind was still coming out of the southeast.

A long inhale.

There was more rain forecast for the night, so whatever had been moving through had not finished moving through yet.

I sat there thinking about growing up at camp.

My father was a high school teacher and coach. In the summers he took extra evening work at Saratoga Raceway. He would drive down after the day was done and work around the horses after the races, collecting urine specimens for testing.

Sometimes we went with him and hung around the stalls. We watched the races from the horse-stall side of things, not the grandstand side. We did not go often, but enough that I remember the smell and the late hours and the strange feeling of being a kid near the machinery of adults and horses and money.

What I remember most is the return pattern, though not as a perfect clocked sequence.

He would come back late from the track, likely before midnight or around one in the morning. He would sleep a few hours, then get up again around 4:30 to go trolling for lake trout.

We often woke when he was coming back in from fishing and heading off for his morning nap. And somewhere in that late-night and early-morning passage, there would be a paper bag from the local bakery on the kitchen table.

Inside were glazed doughnuts.

A baker’s dozen.

Thirteen.

Big, soft, sugar-glazed doughnuts, and one of them always seemed larger than the rest. Doughnut-shaped, but closer in spirit to what people now might call a bear claw — puffy, floury, oversized, sweet enough to stay in memory.

That was what I was thinking about when the birds started going hard around the Upper Watch.

I turned on Merlin and let it listen.

The birds were loud enough that the morning felt occupied by them. I saw robins. I saw a blue jay. A pair of loons came into view on the water. Other birds I did not see at all. They were present by sound, or at least present enough for Merlin to name them.

By the time I checked the recording, Merlin had identified thirteen species.

Another baker’s dozen.

Not a bag on the kitchen table this time.

A wet Sunday morning.

Clouds still overhead.

Southeast wind still moving the weather.

Thirteen names pulled out of the bird noise.

Some seen.

Some only heard.

Some accepted cautiously because a machine was listening with me.

But still, it was a record of the morning. A way to mark that the place had been full before I went back to work in the barn.

A baker’s dozen, left again before the day had fully begun.