A line of tracks from under the porch to the creek and back look like the prints a very small man walking on his hands would make: raccoon.
January 2013
January 16, 2013
Three inches of fresh snow, unmarred by a single human track. A scrabbling of claws: five squirrels on the trunk of a dead maple.
January 15, 2013
With the snowpack in retreat, those seedheads I’d gotten so used to seeing have disappeared back into the underlying chaos of dead weeds.
January 14, 2013
After a warm night, the bare spots are bigger than the patches of white, except in the woods and in the sky. The creek sings higher notes.
January 13, 2013
Thick fog and a slow dripping of meltwater onto the porch roof. Some of the animal tracks in the yard have melted through—dark portholes.
January 12, 2013
The mutter and whine of a distant two-stroke engine. Though the sun’s a dim smear, I can’t stop sneezing. A Carolina wren trills in alarm.
January 11, 2013
Squirrels on the ground: one makes a detour to run along a fallen tree, another digs a walnut out of the dirt and buries it in the snow.
January 10, 2013
January thaw. A nuthatch finds a dead branch so resonant, its probing taps sound as loud as a woodpecker’s, and it flees to a quieter tree.
January 9, 2013
Traffic noise from over the hill is deafening—the icy snowpack has become a sounding board. In the tulip tree, four slow, amorous squirrels.
January 8, 2013
I hold out my glasses and peer at a drop of water left over from the shower: fisheye lens in which the sun falls from bent, inverted trees.
January 7, 2013
Overcast, with a smell of burning plastic in the air. Half-way up the ridge, two crows move about in the treetops without making a sound.
January 6, 2013
The sky is mangy, with blue patches showing through, and the yard is leprose with tracks. A rabbit twitches under the deer-ravaged rosebush.
January 5, 2013
Cold and overcast. A grooming cardinal reaches under his wings, dining on lice. Juncos peck grit from the road to replenish their gizzards.
January 4, 2013
Sleek silhouette of a sharp-shinned hawk. In the rosebush’s densely scribbled heart, the faint throbbing of something with very small bones.