Snowstorm. The porch, too, has been erased, except where some small bird’s meandering footprints have exposed the blood-colored floor.
January 2017
1/30/2017
Every cloud brings a scatter of snow. I gaze at the sun’s bright smudge, remembering a 38,000-year-old depiction of a cow stippled in stone.
1/29/2017
Male cardinals bathe side-by-side in the stream, then resume chasing. A jay perches in a dogwood bush shaking the water from his wings.
1/28/2017
A few, wandering flakes slowly build into a snow squall. From my parents’ back porch, the “towhee” call of a towhee that hasn’t gone south.
1/27/2017
A skim of snow. A jay monitored by three fierce chickadees gives that red-tailed hawk scream—the one that signifies an eagle in the movies.
1/26/2017
The last trace of snow has gone again. The sky is blank. What kind of January is this? Trees rock back and forth like traumatized refugees.
1/25/2017
A clearing wind accompanied by Carolina wren song. At the woods’ edge, moss is already emerging from yesterday’s snow, greener than ever.
1/24/2017
The black-and-white simplicity of a fairy-tale snow that clings to every dark twig: a fragile magic that never lasts beyond eleven o’clock.
1/23/2017
A small hawk flies through the forest in steady rain, perches in the crown of an oak for several minutes, and flies on. The wind picks up.
1/22/2017
The clouds that settled in yesterday haven’t lifted, their slow drift barely perceptible through the shifting clarity of the trees.
1/21/2017
Fog like a soundproof room. As always, the dead cherry’s five splayed stumps are giving the middle finger to the road—to whatever comes.
1/20/2017
Blue jays jeering in the steady rain. In January. One more thing that doesn’t feel right on a day when the world is out of joint.
1/19/2017
An echoey call of a Carolina wren sounding like an old-fashioned telephone. The yellow spot in the clouds that marks the sun slides shut.
1/18/2017
Two ravens hang high against the clouds without flapping a wing. Two more appear and attack, croaking, and all four soar off to the north.