The forsythia is fully in bloom, inconguous yellow against the brown woods—not unlike this apparition of a sun burning a hole through the gray clouds. Kinglets flit through the birches. The mourning dove falls silent.
Under gray skies, the old lilac is once again beginning to green up. The zig-zag flight of a phoebe gleaning breakfast out of thin air.
The sun rises behind the clouds, with the temperature right at freezing. Half of the daffodils lie face-down, the other half hold their heads high. Half the sky turns blue.
Clear and cold. The bird app identifies singers I cannot hear: ruby-crowned kinglet, American goldfinch, Canada goose. Ten minutes later, I do hear another lone goose go over, a slight note of panic in its honks.
After night-long rain, a gray almost-radiance. The black birches are looking sharp in their gray-green lichens. The creek is high and making little sense.
Sun finds the spokes of miniature daffodils opening beside the disease-ravaged lilac. I pull my hat-brim down to watch all the early insects already plying the cold spring air.
Weak sun through a sky more white than blue, where a plane is circling a thousand feet overhead. A tufted titmouse foraging on the thawed earth flies up into a spicebush to prize open a seed.
Cold and still. Sunlit stripes brighten between the trees as the songbird chorus dwindles to one energetic song sparrow in a spicebush next to the springhouse.
Cold and overcast after a night of rain. The creek is a full chorus. A crow alights in the big tulip tree, breaks off a twig and carries it away.
The cool start to a day with a forecast for heat. Red-bellied woodpeckers are winnying in the yard trees. Two or three daffodil buds are swelling into yellow.
Cool and partly sunny. A Cooper’s hawk flies from tree to tree at the woods’ edge, emitting its odd call, then heads off down-hollow, only to slip back five minutes later in silence.
Equinox. I make it out onto the porch just as the sun peeks over the ridge. Phoebes are calling. From the top of a walnut tree, the brown-headed cowbird’s liquid lisp.
Sunrise sung in by song sparrows. I peer at red clouds through a fence of dripping icicles from yesterday’s snow.
A couple inches of snow plastered to the porch and the eastern sides of trees. I can just make out a cardinal’s cheer, cheer above the bitter wind.