A lull in the snowfall and the yard is alive with juncos, hopping around each clump of dried grass, gleaning their second breakfast.
Clear and cold. As the sun climbs higher, the blue deepens. Yesterday’s thin snow clings to the porch floorboards when I try to sweep.
I find my chair where the wind left it at the far end of the porch with a cracked back. Dried cattail leaves flap like banners for the dead.
Slow winter dawn: light leaking through the trees. A Carolina wren’s molto vivace prompts his mate to respond in sforzando.
Cold and gloomy. A raven alights on a squirrel nest at the top of an oak near the woods’ edge and settles in for a minute before flying on.
Quiet except for the distant whine of traffic on I-99 and some small bird chirping behind the oil tanks. The sun comes out for five seconds.
A yellow gash appears in the clouds to the east and heals up again. The cardinal attacks his reflection. Military jets howl over, unseen.
Unseasonably warm. A patchy gray sky. Gliding high above the trees, a vulture, unseasonably far north.
Overcast. A strong smell of sewage from the treatment plant two miles away. Juncos forage in the dead stiltgrass, chirping back and forth.
Cold and still. Mares’ tails running north-south slowly soften into wool. Fresh tire tracks on the road. A crow’s distant note of protest.
The snow squall stops just before I come out all bundled up and squinting at the sun, the porch two inches deep in windblown snow.
Snow. I unfocus my gaze and the flakes become threads, runnels, roots. I remember a dream in which my beard had grown down to the ground.
Sun through trees. Where one squirrel has just raced over the snow another squirrel follows, pausing in the same places. The allure of heat.
Snowflakes in the air give shape to the wind. I sneeze, and a pileated woodpecker emerges from the far side of an oak and flies off.