Bright sun on bare trees, whose discarded leaves still glow. Squirrels scold on and on. Finally a hawk-shaped shadow detaches from an oak.
Month: February 2018
Clear sky. A bluebird warbling up by the barn. High overhead, a pair of ravens fly close together, uttering their most musical croaks.
Bright sun for the first time in days. The wild rhododendron up in the woods shines like a city of glass seen from an airplane window.
The rain finally stops. In the woods and yard, chipmunks zip back and forth like hyperactive exoparasites on the mountain’s glistening pelt.
It has stopped raining. The squirrel with pale fur forages at the edge of a small, marooned cloud. The sky brightens and releases more rain.
The cold rain continues, now misting, now pouring. Beds of moss in the woods begin to look luxurious. Everywhere the sound of running water.
Steady downpour; almost as much water in the road as in the creek. Scattered, flattened stalks in the rain-dark yard are white with mold.
Shirt-sleeve weather. A squirrel unearths a walnut from the yard in that casual way squirrels have of pretending it’s doing something else.
Sun shining through fog. The garden-wall chipmunk must be in heat: two suitors battle for her attention in what’s left of the snow.
The fog is a bad magician. Each time it lifts, it reveals the same trees and snow, the same skinny squirrels, the same two crows jeering.
In the shadows of the treetops, two chipmunks race over and under the three inches of fresh, wet snow. A chickadee sings his spring song.
The sun burns through high clouds. A gleam in the stream from a clump of sedge where spray has made an ice-fingered claw open to the sky.
It’s been raining for 15 hours; the creek roars. The snowy ridges the plow made now resemble the mountains I know, orphaned, deeply eroded.
After a night of rain and unseasonable warmth, the snow cover is threadbare. Moss glows green on the road bank. Waxwings’ silvery whistles.