Mid-morning, and the dial thermometer’s big red arrow creeps toward 50. A small sun and bare trees bend in the distance of its convex glass.
March 2011
3/16/2011
Overcast and damp. In the garden, the new leaves of lamb’s-ears look fresher than they did last fall, delicately furred, alive, alert.
3/15/2011
Sun glimmers through thin clouds, the ground is hazy with frost, and me trying to blink the sleep from my eyes. A nuthatch’s anxious call.
3/14/2011
Scattered snowflakes wander back and forth like lost souls. I watch one explode against a branch of the dead cherry. The croak of a raven.
3/13/2011
On the flattened grass where snow has sat for months, the gray disk of an old hornet nest. The feral cat presses her belly fur to the earth.
3/12/2011
Sunrise: a bluebird warbles. From a thousand feet up, the cry of a killdeer, that lost shorebird, circling the long brown waves of hills.
3/11/2011
The ground is mostly bare again, but the wind is salted with more fine flakes. Water thunders in every ditch. A freight train wails.
3/10/2011
Hard rain falling into slush, and the fog thickening: cloud into cloud. Buds glow yellow on the lilac where two titmice flit.
3/9/2011
Cold and gray. The groundhogs are snarling under the house. A squirrel disinters its breakfast and cleans off the dirt with its teeth.
3/8/2011
Trying to like this late snow, its sparkles and shadows, I hear the distant cries of swans, fleeing north in search of true tundra.
3/7/2011
Snow has turned all the lower limbs into wide white feathers, but treetops are bare against the blue. From somewhere in between, the hawk.
3/6/2011
Small rain on an east wind. Swelling buds impart a faint red hue to the woods’ edge, and a song sparrow states the obvious: spring is here.
3/5/2011
Overcast and quiet. The remaining snowbanks like beached white whales dampen the leaves around them with their slow collapse.
3/4/2011
An urgent, nasal call: the Cooper’s hawks are back. The female glides into a tall pine while the male appears and disappears among the oaks.