Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow
Flurries starting in fifteen minutes, says the weather app, and fifteen minutees later the air is full of flakes wandering this way and that, every bit as sentient as AI bots. By the time they stop half an hour later, I’m a snowman. A squirrel carrying a walnut walks right under my chair.
A half inch of windblown powder atop yesterday’s couple inches of wet snow. A white-throated sparrow foraging on the lee side of the springhouse pauses to sing.
An inch or two of wet snow sticks to everything, and it’s still coming down, bringing the kind of wonderland I’d wondered whether we’d see at all this winter. A song sparrow sings his spring song.
Which will last longest: the snow banks piled up by the plow or by the wind? It’s almost below freezing again, with shifting patches of light and dark overhead like a deck of cards being shuffled.
The stream is loud with snowmelt and last night’s rain. The fog retreats up the hillside, leaving black birch trunks aglow in green lichen.
Fog lingering well into mid-morning. On the northwest-facing hillside, snow cover is down to about 50 percent: lacework, says my internal idealist. In tatters, the realist replies.
Misty and gray, with endless commentary from crows. The sun appears for half a minute without coming fully out, as pileated woodpeckers cackle in the yard.
Overcast with bright patches among the gray. The thaw continues, as if it might be early spring. The bird app hallucinates a red-winged blackbird.
The gray supremacy of fog, filtering out the valley’s noise, leaving only the drumming of woodpeckers and the low rumble of a jet high overhead.
A gray sky gravid with rain. A gray squirrel pops out of a hole in the yard, walnut between its teeth. Up in the woods, a chipmunk zips across the snow.
Clear and still. A squirrel crouched in the lowest crotch of the closest black walnut tree works on her breakfast walnut, tail arched back into a headdress as spiky as the rising sun that sets it aglow.
No matter how I hold my book, snowflakes make their way onto the page. A hole in the clouds fills nearly to the brim with sun before emptying again. Up on the ridge, a squirrel’s alarm call ends as abruptly as it began.
Swarms of large, amalgamated snowflakes fly past the porch well into mid-morning. When the wind drops for a few seconds, they hover nearly motionless, as if awaiting orders.
Thaw. The snowpack has shrunk by about half, and the snowplowed banks that flank the road have opened their dark dirt hearts. The gray sky turns faintly pink as the wind picks up.