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.
Year: 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.
The new snowpack turns blindingly bright as the high, spring sun beats down. Icicles drop on to the porch roof with muffled thuds.
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.
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).
Blue sky with quarry noise and a singing robin. The sun stretches one finger of light down through all the trees on the hillside.
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.
Faint traces of high cloud give a seaside sort of light. I dreamed the wood frogs were calling, but it’s still too cold.
Each morning arrives with a fresh coat of snow, but today’s is threadbare. For a minute or two, the wind is whiter than the ground.
A slightly warmer morning than yesterday, with fatter snowflakes floating across a bleary sun. The red-bellied woodpecker trills and trills.
Small flakes sting my cheek; ice-bound trees squeak and groan. From the feeder up at my parents’ house, the happy chatter of snowbirds.
Had I not risen early I would’ve missed the sun, the rooster, two doves’ calls blending into something like the distant locomotive’s chord.
Cold and gloomy, but the yard seethes with birds: juncos, cardinals, wren. A hundred yards away, a hawk sits on a limb, bedeviled by crows.
An achingly blue sky, and the sun lower than it should be thanks to the tyranny of clocks. Crows yell. The ground sparkles with frost.