The warmest morning in weeks. Under a gray-wool sky, two gray squirrels climb slowly together up one of the tallest woods-edge trees—in the mood, it seems, for love.
A wedge of yellow light in the clouds for half an hour past sunrise. I’m learning to spot when a squirrel is about to dig up a nut: it stares off into space in one last effort to convince any watcher that it’s doing something entirely different.
An hour past sunrise, the clouds are darker closer to the horizon. Three crows are having an argument in the treetops that ends with one of them angrily leaving the premises. The hiss of wind.
A hole in the clouds at dawn fails to hold the whole full moon—a brief, bright searchlight. Later, at sunrise, a chorus of chiselers as gray squirrels work on their black walnuts.
Gloomy and cold. A mourning dove stays frozen on its branch at the woods’ edge half an hour after the Cooper’s hawk’s failed sortie at the feeders.
A fresh inch and a half of dry snow, and the bitter wind that bore it now ushering a flotilla of orange clouds across a sky of startling blue. From my mother’s house, the murmur of voices on the radio like a distant surf, accompanied not by the cries of gulls but the chatter of house finches.
A screech owl’s shivery call. It’s too dark at first to see the shimmer of snow in the air, but as sunrise approaches one can begin to distinguish white streaks, like a head of hair just beginning to go gray.
I have to sweep three inches of snow off the porch before I can sit down, and when I do, flakes of great size land on my lap—little throwing stars a quarter-inch across. When the wind drops, I can hear the Carolina wren.
Bare trees dance wildly in the wind, branches clacking like castanets. Snowmelt dripping from the roof flies back up toward the fast-moving clouds.
Thick fog that lingers for hours, cancelling most noise except for the muffled taps of woodpeckers. A red squirrel nearly walks under my chair, then thinks better of it.
The ground is white again, not with snow but an inch of sleet that has turned to slush. Snowflakes swirl through the air. The sun peeks out.
Cold, overcast, and quieter even than Christmas day. An hour past sunrise, the sky brightens a little. Two crows fly past, yelling. The gloom returns.
A heavily overcast Christmas morning. With the hum of industry stilled, I can hear the wind in the pines a hundred yards off—a sleeper’s sudden, long sigh.
Dawn. A raven emerges from a tall pine near the powerline, croaking and circling until his mate joins him. How is the wind this morning? Evidently just right.