I bask in the sun, listening to the creek’s borborygmi. In my last dream before waking, it had grown huge and thunderous as an angry god.
February 2017
2/12/2017
Cold rain is once again erasing the snow. Off in the fog, the neighbor’s rooster crows like a conquistador laying claim to the bare ground.
2/11/2017
Ten degrees above freezing at sunrise. A squirrel leaps through the soft snow like a salmon swimming upstream. High overhead, a raven calls.
2/10/2017
Snow remains on the thicker limbs, making a dramatic graffiti on the dark wall of trees—erased here and there by busybody squirrels.
2/9/2017
Snow fell in the night, starting wet and finishing dry. Eighteen white caps top the dried heads of a bergamot stalk beside the porch.
2/8/2017
For hours last night the rain gutter thundered, so now once again the ground has been un-erased; snow remains only where the plow piled it.
2/7/2017
Fog blurs the distinction between white ground and white sky. The distant drum roll of a pileated woodpecker followed by a patter of rain.
2/6/2017
Chipmunks coming into heat chase each other over the bright, melting snow. I recall that their name comes from the Ojibwe for “headlong.”
2/5/2017
Under low, gray clouds, the sound of traffic from the valley. A titmouse at the woods’ edge keeps whistling his one, querulous note.
2/4/2017
Sunny and cold. A chipmunk’s awake, racing over the snow at the woods’ edge. Icicles fall from the roof and shatter with a festive tinkling.
2/3/2017
A long log has slid down so that it rests like a seesaw on the top of the road bank. Tree shadows on the snow darken and grow faint again.
2/2/2017
I watch two different squirrel entourages trailing females through the treetops until both are swallowed by a slow-moving snow squall.
2/1/2017
A patch of dirt laid bare by the snow plow is aswirl with birds of all kinds. Even a robin appears, as if to assess the likelihood of worms.