With deep snow, the ground is so much smoother, and the sun can stretch across it now without getting lost in a thousand holes and hollows.
December 2013
12/15/2013
Sometime in the night, the rabbit ventured out for a quick snack on lilac bark. Its tracks are half buried by still more snow.
12/14/2013
The steady, insidious business of snow. A chickadee lands on a small branch and samples its line of white powder.
12/13/2013
After two days of soaking up sun, the sage plant’s fat, gray-green leaves have melted the snow-pack around each protruding sprig.
12/12/2013
Trees pop in the cold. I close my eyes against the sun and watch its track fade on my retina: a connect-the-dots drawing gone wrong.
12/11/2013
Hollow thumps where a rabbit dashes across the slick snow-crust, alarmed, perhaps, by the sun’s blinding path through the trees.
12/10/2013
At first the snow falls straight and serious. But as it thins, they seem to lose their direction and wander back and forth, these flakes.
12/9/2013
After 15 hours of freezing fog, every twig is spiky with eldritch feathers. A squirrel makes a small thunder by running on the crusted snow.
12/8/2013
At mid-morning, before the snow starts its quiet infiltration, before the hard knuckles of sleet, the distant hysteria of a mob of crows.
12/7/2013
New snow—already despoiled by deer digging for grass. I watch a red-bellied woodpecker inch down one side of a tree and inch up the other.
12/6/2013
The last of the snow is gone, and the moss that lay under it for a week looks greener than ever. A distant train horn blows a minor chord.
12/5/2013
It’s warm. Filmy-winged flies drift past the porch. A flock of geese arrows low over the house—the wft wft wft of their great wings.
12/4/2013
Small birds appear as they fly past, and the sun, too, emerges only to vanish a second later, the fog turning from yellow back to white.
12/3/2013
Crow talks to crow in crow-talk, says “Crow!” The third crow says “Eat!” (It is just warm enough for carrion to be carried off.)