Clear and cold. Two red squirrels chase around the bole of the big tulip tree, chittering madly. Threadbare as it is, the snow cover still glitters in all the colors of the rainbow.
Cold, quiet, and mostly clear for the solstice. Small clouds turn blood-red at dawn, fade to yellow, then turn a lurid orange at sunrise. A red squirrel pauses at the edge of the porch to glare at me.
A cloudless sunrise. The ground is once again white, after yesterday’s snow squalls, and it’s very still. When the wren stops singing, I can hear a low gurgle from the spring.
Warm, torrential showers overnight have reduced the snow to a few, scattered patches. The clouds thin—a radiant break in the rain.
Dark and still. A shadow bounds over the icy snow of my garden—weasel or flying squirrel? Ten minutes later, the first sparrows begin to chirp.
Patches of blue sky open and close as snowmelt drips from the roof. An oak leaf cartwheels up the icy driveway.
Very cold and still. A fingernail moon slips through the trees’ dark digits. Dawn comes with a shift of radiance from the snow-covered ground to the sky.
Cloudy, windy, and bitter cold, but a house finch caroling by the springhouse sounds genuinely joyful — a soundtrack for the scattered snowflakes flying this way and that.
Sunday-morning silence deepened by fresh snow, with flakes still flurrying about. A band of orange appears in the clouds. The furnace under the house rumbles to life.
Cold and heavily overcast, with an inversion layer bringing the sounds of tires singing on the interstate, white-throated sparrows awakening in the meadow, and the clink of tin cans against birdfeeders from up at the other house, my mother clearing her throat.
The sun clears the ridgetop and a bank of clouds by 8:30. The female Carolina wren trills, but there’s no sign of the male, who was missing last night from his usual roost above the laundry-room door. A half moon hangs overhead, pale as a slice of apple.
A bitter cold wind at dawn. A raven croaking as high as a crow flies over, setting off a chickadee. Then nothing again but the sound of wind.
Waiting for a weather system that stays west of the Allegheny Front, I give up on the chance of snow, go in just as the sun burns through the clouds—a smear of blaze.
Overcast and still. A squirrel running across the road drops the frozen walnut in her teeth, and it rolls along by itself for a few feet. Up on the ridge, a tree pops from the cold.