On the first morning of my married life, the sky is as blue as it gets. Phoebe, rooster, bluebird. The sparkle of frost gives way to sheen.
March 2018
3/30/2018
Cloudy and cold, though the birds are chirpy as ever. Fine day for an outdoor wedding, the gloomy groom says to himself. It starts to rain.
3/29/2018
On a hillside once again nearly snow-free, the fog withdraws, advances and surrounds like the subtlest of foes. A phoebe’s insistent song.
3/28/2018
Fog settles in, full of the labor of freight trains. Snow mounded up by the plow rots in the otherwise bare yard like a white whale carcass.
3/27/2018
Under a low cloud ceiling, the keening calls of waxwings. Daffodils have raised their green spears all around the broken statue of a dog.
3/26/2018
The sun yellows one branch after another. From the east, the sound of a pneumatic hammer burrowing in the bed of a 450 million-year-old sea.
3/25/2018
Cold as a well under a deep blue sky torn by the distant roar of military jets. The morning singers carry on: cardinal, song sparrow, robin.
3/24/2018
Bright sun. After several days of freeze and thaw, the snow conforms to every bump and divot as if the hillside has been shrink-wrapped.
3/23/2018
Blue shadows on the snow and a breeze with teeth. I test the snow by tossing out an apple core. It bounces rather than sinks.
3/22/2018
The new snowpack turns blindingly bright as the high, spring sun beats down. Icicles drop on to the porch roof with muffled thuds.
3/21/2018
It’s the absence of sound that makes a snowstorm so disquieting. A squirrel plows its way through snow-laden treetops—a slow-moving cascade.
3/20/2018
An ashen sky, gravid with snow. The field sparrow’s back: that song that sounds like rising excitement (or alarm, depending on one’s mood).
3/19/2018
Blue sky with quarry noise and a singing robin. The sun stretches one finger of light down through all the trees on the hillside.
3/18/2018
A squirrel leaps out of a tree, falls 20 feet to the ground and runs off. The dog stares mournfully at a pool of bile she’s just thrown up.