Dawn. The soft calls and dark moving forms of sparrows seem covert, even illicit, until the Carolina wren’s alarm clock chatters to life.
Year: 2010
I pause at the door, coffee in hand: six juncos decorate the dead cherry, fat, motionless. A pileated woodpecker cackles at the wood’s edge.
I don seven layers of clothing to sunbathe on the porch. My chair has slid to the northeast end, its back to the prevailing wind.
An impossible butterfly dances past the porch: a shred of oak leaf. The trees creak and groan in the bitter-cold wind.
With winter’s gift of unimpeded sight and a white backdrop, I watch crows hop and circle a dark carcass 100 yards off through the woods.
Freezing rain and fog. Snowbirds crowd the melted tire tracks in the gravel driveway, filling their gizzards wth grit while they can.
The boom of a rifle. A small hawk glides through the trees, lands between me and the faint yellow blotch of sun and waggles its tail.
Emily Dickinson’s 180th birthday. The sky’s flat whiteness matches the ground: the blank of a page, of self-erasure, of astonishment.
Cold, and an iron wind. Two murders of crows rage at each other from the crowns of adjacent oaks, the sunrise slippery on their napes.
Sun! And clouds thinning to snow-gauze on their leeward sides. A junco tries to fly into the wind, turns sidewise, lands with a chirp.
The hissing of the wind blends with the sighing of my furnace. I wonder how far away this latest drift was born. Is it Pittsbugh’s snow?
Creak and rattle from the woods. A distant gunshot. Overhead, the shapely cumulus could almost be a summer sky, if it didn’t move so fast.
That first snow still cloaks the frozen earth. When the wind dies, I can hear the 75 finches at my parents’ birdfeeder, a twittering bedlam.
Snowflakes sail past like far-flung voyagers. On the otherwise lifeless tansy stalks, a green sprig harbors a single, yolk-colored bloom.