From my back porch, I can look down upon the streets below and see the rooftops of other houses. Beyond them is the mountain (small as it is, we folks in Keyser still like to think of it that way) that runs along the length of New Creek.

The three giant silver maple trees that dominated the back yard of my youth have been gone for decades, but a few of their relatives survive in the vacant lot down over the hill. Their yellow flowers turn almost overnight into double-bladed seed pods that still remind me of tiny helicopters when they break free, fall to the earth and take root.

Mostly, I sit and enjoy the sky and what soars and sings in it.

With spring and summer there are cardinals, robins, finches, doves and other birds whose names I don’t know. I always whisper a greeting to the cardinals, because no one loved them more than Mary Calemine, who was like my second mother.

Two robins touch down together atop the weathered gray dome of the church next door, then chirp happy congratulations to each other. A third robin joins them, loudly boasting, “Look at me, all the way up here!”

Other birds alight on the power lines, swaying there for a moment before fluttering off to a tree, the pinnacle of my garage roof or the walkway railings and other perches the church provides. I watched while their young began to test the air and its challenges, and I know that next spring, a new generation will gather outside my window in the morning to waken me with their songs.

Fall has brought delta-winged chimney swifts to a frequent-flier convention that gathers in the late afternoon.

They peel off in groups of two, three or four, foraging for gnats and other aerial food that’s too tiny for me to see, and soon the sky becomes empty. All at once, they come back — dozens of them, swirling together in a vast, chaotic, dogfight.

I wonder what they feel. Only rarely do I fly in my dreams, and then I can sense the wind as it makes my shirtsleeves and pantlegs flutter. If I ever dream that I’ve grown feathers, I’ll keep that to myself.

Ducks dash past in their descent to paddle and splash around in New Creek. How many folks can actually look down upon ducks as they fly? I can. These are wild ones who’ve come to live with the descendants of Easter peeps my boyhood friends and I turned loose after they outgrew our mothers’ patience.

Three brilliant cigar-shaped somethings trail each other slowly southward in the distance. Imaginative folks might see UFOs, but I decide they’re only the fuselages of faraway airplanes reflecting the day’s last sunlight. Besides, my powerful binoculars show a hint of tailfins that no flying saucer would need.

The same fading sun that lights these cigars also ignites the western borders of my clouds with a pink and orange radiance.

One cloud bank that covers nearly a third of the sky looks like a vast platinum-and-purple valley, bordered on one side by a long ridgetop that descends to a stream running beside its base ... much as New Creek follows the slope of its mountain. Across the stream is a forest whose treetops are in straight, orderly rows, and then there’s a gradual slope that rises to a plateau on the far side. What fantastic creatures might live there, even if only for a moment?

Maybe God doesn’t actually carve what we see in the clouds, but he surely created the forces that do. No human artist could conceive such towering wavetops that froth and billow silently and seemingly without motion — unlike their louder and more vigorous kin in the sea. As they creep from horizon to horizon, they offer a cosmic kaleidoscope that, with each turn, offers a panorama nobody’s seen before, or ever will see again.

The low, fast-moving clouds that bring the storms break up after the rain ends, sometimes into pillars that reach high enough to catch the dying sunlight. Like a log jutting from a dying campfire, one end still glows, but the other has turned ashen and dark.

The green of New Creek’s hillside shows faint splashes of yellow and rust. The crickets, katydids and other critters that my mom and dad and I called “peepers” are singing loudly and round-the-clock. The stars are coming out earlier these days, and there’s a cool breeze; I decide to open the windows and let some of it in.

These things tell me another winter is coming ... but not just yet.

I catch a few notes from the Methodist choir as it practices next door. On the streets below, a few other folks are out on their porches. Children play, running or riding tiny bikes and scooters.

A dog discovers a garbage bag stuffed partway into a can at the corner of his yard. Despite his determination, for all that he jumps and stretches, it’s just out of his reach. He gets a brief toothhold on it, but it resists and slips teasingly back in place.

I don’t know whether to root for him, because if he succeeds he will reap much more than the bag’s aromatic treasures when his master sees what he’s done. Finally, he loses interest and trots to the fence to share his troubles with his barking partner next door.

There are times when I get the feeling that what I’ve seen and heard was put there for me and no one else.

As I grow older and hopefully wiser, the more I am convinced that the harder you search for something, the less likely you are to find it — but if you sit quietly and patiently, watching and listening, you might be amazed at what comes to you.

I often pray while sitting on my porch. One evening as I did that, the full moon began to emerge from the treetops on the ridge of New Creek’s hillside.

I took it as an answer: “I’m still here, and I’m still listening.”

Of that I have no doubt. The proof lies in what I see and hear around me.