Foggy and warm. Two nuthatches at the woods’ edge tangle in mid-air, tumbling a dozen feet before retreating to separate tree trunks. Near the top of the big tulip tree, a gray squirrel is leaping from limb to limb.
A mid-morning break in the rain. A red-winged blackbird calls once as the fog retreats to the ridgetop. Robins tut-tut. An altercation breaks out among the red-bellied woodpeckers.
In thick fog, the bright flesh of lilac and tulip tree limbs barked by squirrels for their nests. The last few patches of snow look as bedraggled as old bandages.
Rain at one degree above freezing. How sweet it must taste to the daffodil bulbs awakening in the thawed garden and the wild onions stirring at the meadow’s edge.
A white sky except where the sun blazes, whiter than white. A helicopter’s loud, bladed flower. In its wake, the scattered cries of geese.
The clouds begin to fray, letting the sun through. It’s cold again. A small piece of sandstone sits on the end of my porch like a message, I’m not sure from whom.
The croaking of ravens has given way to the yelling of crows. As the sun heats the porch roof, it begins to weep melted frost. Contrails linger in the sky like old scars.
Not a cloud in the sky, and many of the scattered white patches on the ground won’t last till tomorrow. The monotony of crow takes over from the monotony of a tufted titmouse.
Bright sun in a cloudless sky at one degree above freezing. The spring has subsided to a hearty gurgle—the loudest thing once the cardinal falls silent.
Five degrees above freezing, but snow goes on falling. A chipmunk runs from the woods’ edge into the snowy garden, possibly on a hunt for love. The dripdripdrip of snowmelt onto the porch roof.
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.