It’s cold. A few, desultory flakes drift down from a half-clear sky. The trees’ long shadows fade in and out.
Year: 2014
The wind has been busy, sweeping the new snow to the corners of the porch and half-burying the few tracks in the yard, which include my own.
Snow fine as dust—I notice it first as a slight shimmy in the trees. A plump mourning dove’s tiny head swivels from side to side.
Sunlight softened by high clouds. A great stillness, punctuated by the flutter of sparrow wings and a chickadee singing its spring song.
Just two wild garlic heads remain in the yard, dangling on their stalks like sad, gray Christmas ornaments above the glittery white.
Sun glints on ice-slicked branches and the glossy crust of the hardened snowpack. The distant, mechanical howl of a fire siren.
Freezing rain on a bed of sleet: like listening to thousands of pins dropping. A nuthatch ascends a tree head-first like a brown creeper.
A junco separated from its flock chirps noisily in the lilac. At the edge of the field, two crows do their frantic best to gin up a mob.
It’s snowing; the bergamot heads wear new, conical caps. A mourning dove flies past the porch on nearly silent wings, headed for the pines.
When I step out, a pileated woodpecker flies cackling from a nearby tree, his crest as bright as a stop light this gray and rainy morning.
A red-bellied woodpecker yammers from tree to tree, all around the yard. A builder drives by with nothing in the bed of his truck.
Two degrees below freezing. Juncos bathe in the creek, darting into the currant bushes to groom. A house finch’s labyrinthine cadenza.
Just as bright as yesterday, but warmer. The snow is difficult to look at. I bite into an apple and a nuthatch scolds me for the noise.
Clear and very cold. The muffled roar of distant military jets. From up at the other house, a tufted titmouse’s monotonous chant.