Ground and sky are the same flat white aside from a smear of sun. Down-hollow, a mob of crows. A squirrel hurls itself through the treetops.
Year: 2017
The yard is crisscrossed by fresh tracks of animals. A chickadee lands in a fretwork spandrel and peers intently at the old hornets’ nest.
A cold gray day. Juncos forage on the road and in the yard where a deer has dug. The dull knocks of a pileated woodpecker trepanning an oak.
Snow! Five inches of dry powder, and a light breeze sweeping it from the treetops: gauzy, luminous curls like falling smoke.
Cold, with a bitter wind. I find all the furniture huddled at the end of the porch, a chair smashed, the table on its back like a beetle.
Just below freezing; the snow lays here and melts there. A flock of finches in the treetops—punctuation marks in search of a sentence.
Scattered chickadee calls coalesce into a heated argument. The sun emerges for half a minute through a vulva-shaped opening in the clouds.
Snowflakes land on the dog’s thick brown fur and take a long time to melt. I begin to look differently at the brown, snow-dusted hillside.
A great silence punctuated only by an occasional gun shot. A squirrel digs up a black walnut from beside the porch and bounds off with it.
Cold and still under a flat white sky. Then calls of chickadees, excited about the least thing. A Carolina wren pops up to scold the dog.
Cold and overcast. The wind eddies around the house, bringing first a few snowflakes, then the distant mechanical gargle of an engine brake.
After last night’s wind, the trees are finally almost bare. I close my eyes against the sun and a lurid sky with dark lacework rises up.
In the steady rain, a gray squirrel is climbing all over the big tulip tree, as if searching for something. A raven goes croaking overhead.
Late morning: the sun finally comes out. The cedar tree beside the house chirps and shakes with juncos, which soon spill out into the weeds.